Drone Pilot Credentialing for Air Safety

Drone operations are estimated to bring €10bn/yr to the EU economy by 2035. A critical e-Government issue is the ability to fly drones in regulated airspace around airports. Unauthorised drone operations in the flightpath of passenger aircraft can endanger lives and cause huge financial loss for airport operators. Heathrow Airport has invested >£10M in security systems to track and destroy unauthorised drones. Digitising the entire drone flight approvals process will involve many steps, but the major one we are addressing is verifying pilot training credentials. SSI could radically improve this currently cumbersome and low-trust process. In an Innovate-UK grant funded project (Fly2Plan), we developed an SSI PoC for a drone pilot training company to issue training certificates as verifiable credentials to drone pilots, which can be verified by Heathrow Airport. In this talk we present our learnings and future work.