Valencia to Build a “Drone Highway” for Urban Air Mobility Services

While the US and other countries are considered leaders in unmanned aerial vehicles, at home in Spain the Valencian Community is playing a leading role. The Spanish city of Valencia is preparing to create a “drone highway,” initially for services such as medicine delivery, with the aim of eventually opening it to people, for example for air taxis.

What may really surprise many is that the region already has three drone highways built, and secondary roads or corridors are currently being qualified.

Valencia officials are working on creating the drone highway together with the Polytechnic University of Valencia (UPV), which is particularly strong in technology and innovation training and development programs. 

The project reportedly received full support after Enaire, which manages Spain's airspace, signed a protocol with the organizers describing the integration of the corridor into the national network. This operational framework covers traditional aircraft, drones and other urban air mobility (UAM) vehicles. 

News that Valencia is working on a drone air route and that a protocol was agreed with Enaire came shortly after European rules governing the use of drones were approved.

For this reason, the initially planned operations, such as delivery of medical supplies and other parcels, will also extend to those transporting human passengers once they are put into service without a full regulatory review of the airspace.

The new drone highway, announced in November 2021, will serve Valencia itself and work in tandem with three existing corridors in the surrounding area: one is a communications testing facility at the small Sierra de Agua airfield west of Valencia, another is at the larger Castellón airport north of the city, and the third is in Muchamiel, near Alicante.

Secondary corridors branching off from them are currently being explored, and the new highway will be built within Valencia itself. All of them are expected to be completed and ready for use between 2023 and 2025.

New drone air routes are currently being built, which will include corridors within Valencia. Israel Quintanilla, director of the UPV's official drone commission, speaking about the speed at which cars took over cities, said that “the development of these highways will be very fast.” He went on to say that “Airbus and Boeing have already created two divisions to integrate transport gifts.”

As part of this, all drones operating in Spain will have to transmit their flight positions and trajectories to the systems ultimately chosen to manage airspace, starting from January 2023. Building the digital infrastructure to coordinate these data flows, and the drone traffic they represent, will be one of the biggest challenges in creating the new highway.

Nevertheless, officials predict that once these navigation coordination systems are built and services launched, the growth of drone traffic for delivery and other transport will rival the growth in the number of cars in previous decades.

Currently, nearly all non-recreational drone flights in the Valencia area are carried out by hospitals using UAVs to shorten the time needed to transport vital medicines or equipment between themselves, as well as by Spain's police forces, one of the most active proponents of drone technology in the country.

Last summer, the Spanish company Direccion General de Trafico announced that it had more than doubled its previous fleet of 11 drones to 39 units, helping police monitor national highways during the summer surge in trips for accidents and illegal driving behavior, such as sending text messages. 

Back in October 2020, UAM aircraft manufacturer EHang reported that it had cooperated with Spain's national police to study the possibility of using the company's autonomous aircraft as official vehicles for security missions and emergency response.

A drone highway is already in use by the Guardia Civil, and during the second wave of the coronavirus pandemic, medical supplies were transported across Valencia between the Arnau de Vilanova hospital and the Feria Valencia exhibition center. While a road delivery usually takes 20 to 30 minutes, drones managed the job in three minutes.

Quintanilla said: “We don't want people to think that all this happened by chance. It is planned, and we want it to be available for use in medicine, as well as for providing services and goods to private individuals.”

The news that Valencia will get Spain's first drone air highway should not surprise residents of the city itself, which is a leader in technological development.