Despite significant investment in the drone industry, the limited adoption and engagement with drone capabilities poses strong concern for the industry. As we argued in our open letter to the Future of Flight Industry Group, End users are the gateway for the drone industry to provide benefits to society. To avoid market failure it's critical we do more to bring them to the forefront and address their critical adoption challenges.

Ajuno, Airwards, ARPAS-UK and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology brought together leading drone end users and sector community groups to establish the End user Advancement and Sharing Exchange (EASE) through an inaugral meeting at the Department for Transport in April 2024. By breaking down sector silos EASE provides key benefits:

•      Achieve more with less – EASE enables greater sharing between end users across sectors.

•      Effective communications & aligned strategy – EASE provides a single strategic point for government and regulators to engage with and aligns resource effort.

The community identified a breadth of initiatives to address critical challenges that together, form the basis of a government-industry championed UK drone commercialisation programme. The next steps are to refine this and for members to take ownership of its delivery. This will unlock drones for the mainstream market, ‘crossing the chasm’, and provide immense resultant impacts for society.

Download the paper now and build on, challenge and share the ideas.

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