Skyports Drone Services Part of New Trial “to Discover if Drones Can Help Improve Water Quality in UK”
Skyports Drone Services announced this week that its craft are being deployed to improve water quality monitoring in UK coastal waters and estuaries, reports a press release. This is part of a collaborative trial involving Northumbrian Water, Makutu and RS Hydro.
Called ‘Project Kingfisher’, this is the world’s first drone trial for the water industry. It has already entered a second phase to explore the use of autonomous technologies and prove that uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAV) can support water data collection and monitoring.
The release explains, “Following initial test flights in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, earlier this year, this next phase expands across the North East of England. The trials will showcase how drone operations can help water companies respond more effectively to issues, improve worker safety and streamline the collection of water quality data from hard-to-reach areas.”
At present, Northumbrian Water relies on staff to manually collect samples, which can be time-consuming and inefficient. In some of the most remote locations, the travel to testing sites can take several hours.
Skyports is leading the flights using its all-electric Speedbird Aero multi-rotor craft, capable of covering distances of up to 20 km on a single battery charge. The release continues, “The UAV is equipped with various sensors that are lowered by a winch into designated sample points to measure multiple water quality parameters in situ. The collected data is transmitted in real-time to Northumbrian Water as a live data feed.” Named after the way these drones can hover and swoop down like a kingfisher, the Project is showing promising results.

Members of the Project Kingfisher team with one of its drones (Credit: Skyports)
Cheska P. Rojas, the Project Kingfisher Lead at Skyports, commented, “Water quality monitoring is a really compelling drone inspection use case, which we’re excited to be developing through the Project. The latest phase of trials build on information gathered earlier in the year and is an important step towards scaling these services and eventually rolling them out in other parts of the UK.” Adding, “The work we’re doing here aims to bring tangible improvements to UK water environments and the communities that use them.”
John Edwards, Technical Policy Manager at Northumbrian Water, remarked, “The work we have conducted over the past month has been incredibly valuable for us and helped us to understand the true benefits and opportunities this could unlock for the entire water industry in the future.”
He continued, “Water quality is an incredibly important topic at the moment, so it’s great that we are able to use these innovative trials to see how our regional coasts and rivers are monitored by providing valuable data.”
James Sumsion, CEO of Makutu, added, “Finding innovative, low cost, environmentally sound and repeatable ways to obtain and analyse valuable water quality data is key to protecting and improving the environment in which we live. We are very pleased as to how these trials have progressed and look forward to significantly building out this capability within the next phase of the program.”
For more information
https://skyportsdroneservices.com/
(Top image: Skyports Drone Services)
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