Altitude Angel to work with iOCO to build foundations for South Africa’s urban air mobility infrastructure

Alti­tude Angel and iOCO, South Africa’s largest ICT solu­tions sup­pli­er, have agreed to form an alliance to pro­vide the build­ing blocks on which the country’s urban air mobil­i­ty infra­struc­ture can be built and sup­port­ed.

Cap­i­tal­is­ing on the two busi­ness­es core strengths, the part­ner­ship will explore the oppor­tu­ni­ties sur­round­ing the inte­gra­tion of Alti­tude Angel’s mar­ket lead­ing uni­fied traf­fic man­age­ment (UTM) tech­nol­o­gy and iOCO’s sig­nif­i­cant nation­al infra­struc­ture and rela­tion­ship net­work.

Richard Ellis, Alti­tude Angel, Chief Busi­ness Offi­cer, said: “Alti­tude Angel and iOCO are both com­mit­ted to open­ing the skies above South Africa by pro­vid­ing reg­u­la­tors, gov­ern­ment depart­ments, air­ports, landown­ers, and local busi­ness­es with the dig­i­tal infra­struc­ture need­ed on which to build a strong and sus­tain­able drone econ­o­my.

“Our col­lab­o­ra­tion with iOCO has great poten­tial, not only for our busi­ness­es, but also the wider UAM and UAV indus­tries. The devel­op­ments and deploy­ments we’re able to show­case in South Africa will have real-world appli­ca­tions for busi­ness all over the globe which is very excit­ing.” 

Alti­tude Angel’s soft­ware enables those plan­ning to oper­ate or devel­op UTM/U‑Space solu­tions to quick­ly inte­grate robust data and ser­vices with min­i­mum effort. and iOCO’s sig­nif­i­cant nation­al infra­struc­ture and rela­tion­ship net­work.

From a con­sis­tent, well-doc­u­ment­ed and stan­dards-based plat­form, drone man­u­fac­tur­ers such as DJI and cut­ting-edge soft­ware devel­op­ers around the world use its devel­op­er plat­form to obtain rich, rel­e­vant and local geofenc­ing data, exchange and share flight plans, de-con­flict their own flights in real-time and inter­face with nation­al flight autho­ri­sa­tion sys­tems.

Alti­tude Angel’s first par­ty solu­tions also pow­er some of the world’s lead­ing ANSPs, avi­a­tion author­i­ties and Enter­pris­es, includ­ing LVNL (Nether­lands) and Avi­nor (Nor­way), empow­er­ing them with new capa­bil­i­ties to safe­ly man­age and inte­grate drone traf­fic into nation­al oper­a­tions.

Bri­an Hard­ing, iOCO, Group Exec­u­tive, added: “iOCO is thrilled to be work­ing with Alti­tude Angel. Inte­grat­ing our lead­ing tech­nol­o­gy with Alti­tude Angel’s GuardianUTM plat­form can make BVLOS (beyond visu­al line of sight) flights an every­day occur­rence. iOCO and Alti­tude Angel have all the com­po­nents need­ed to make this a very suc­cess­ful col­lab­o­ra­tion.”

Ear­li­er this year, Alti­tude Angel part­nered up with Urban-Air Port and Safe­guard Ver­ti­ports to work on the world’s first infra­struc­ture pro­gramme, which is backed by the UK Gov­ern­ment.

The project will involve design­ing safe and clean con­nect Air Archi­tec­ture™ for future air taxis and autonomous logis­tics drones. All three com­pa­nies will now work togeth­er to design, devel­op and show­case oper­a­tional Air Archi­tec­ture™ at the Urban-Air Port Air One® site in Coven­try lat­er this year.

For more infor­ma­tion about Alti­tude Angel, vis­it https://www.altitudeangel.com/