In 1849, the Austrian Navy launched a 6.5-kilometre Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone attack using unmanned hot air balloons armed with explosives. It was the world’s first known BVLOS flight, and it failed spectacularly. Without weather data or control links, the Austrians ended up bombing their own troops.
“That's not a joke or a typo,” said Thomas Neubauer, CEO of Dimetor. “The biggest problems they had were that they didn’t have any data (no wind information, no connectivity), and it showed.”
Today, over 175 years later, the core challenge remains the same. BVLOS success depends on trusted data, reliable infrastructure, and systems built for real-world complexity.
At Aerial Cities 2024, our executive-level, invitation-only gathering, a panel of industry leaders and regulators examined why BVLOS operations are still struggling to move beyond test sites and pilot projects, and what it will take to change that.
From telecom-driven infrastructure to real-time safety assurance, and from AI-powered regulatory sandboxes to the economics of interoperability, panellists shed light on this complex ecosystem eager to advance but still in need of systemic alignment. Their discussions highlighted a critical shift: Regulation, once seen as a hurdle, is now increasingly an enabler, provided it is shaped through close industry collaboration and supported by digital transformation.
Moderated by Dr. Christoph Selig, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Unisphere GmbH, the conversation brought together Thomas Neubauer, Co-Founder and CEO of Dimetor; Andrew Carter, Co-Founder and CEO of ResilienX; Thomas Jimenez, Market Director for UAS/AAM at Kongsberg Geospatial; and Giovanni Di Antonio, Director of Technological Innovation at ENAC, Italy’s Civil Aviation Authority.
From balloons to 5G: Why infrastructure still shapes drone success
Thomas Neubauer opened the panel with the story of those 1849 balloon strikes, highlighting a moment of historical irony that illustrates how critical environmental awareness is to any BVLOS mission. Today’s skies may be digitised, but the mission remains the same: Don’t lose control.
He explained that while we now have mobile networks and satellites, true scalability relies on turning these digital infrastructures into dependable aviation-grade systems. Dimetor’s software maps cellular network performance in 3D airspace, allowing drone operators to understand where connectivity is strong or insufficient.
“For example, where in the airspace do you have sufficient connectivity or not? What is the number of people on the ground? That is dynamic. Census data doesn’t cut it,” added Thomas.
He argued that scalable BVLOS drone operations depend on real-time, trusted digital infrastructure: Connectivity, GPS assurance, spoofing detection, and people density mapping; all of which telecoms are now positioned to provide.
“The biggest business opportunity in drone delivery is data,” Thomas noted.
Telecoms, he emphasised, are delivering that today as a core business. For this and more reasons, it's crucial to get telecoms on board, get the authority approvals, and deliver the information that’s needed to safely scale.
Trust through data: From drones to commercial airspace
Andrew Carter, who has spent nearly two decades integrating drones into national airspace, built on that theme. His experience informed a core insight: The missing piece in commercial BVLOS adoption is not technology; it’s trust and assurance.
“We realised that there was this problem of safety assurance,” Andrew explained. “The policies, the standards — they really didn’t match up to what technology was being brought to the table.”
This gap led to the founding of ResilienX, which builds systems for real-time operational safety assurance.
“We asked, can we add a layer that addresses the safety and resiliency of these ecosystems that the FAA or the regulator is going to actually adopt and care about?” he added.
In practice, this has meant deploying digital operations centres and real-time monitoring systems that not only facilitate BVLOS operations but also make them defensible from a regulatory perspective.
“What we’ve really seen over the years is that we understand the infrastructure and the systems that need to be put in place for BVLOS operations,” he explained.
However, he also noted that the business models don’t currently support that.
"You have businesses that know that if they invest five million dollars, they can fly beyond visual line of sight. But there’s not a business reason. They can’t make money that way.”
For Andrew, the key lies in regional infrastructure and standardised safety frameworks. To move forward, the industry must show that BVLOS is safe and economically viable; and that regional infrastructure and standards are crucial.
The Italian approach of regulation through digital transformation
Giovanni Di Antonio brought the regulatory perspective into sharp focus by sharing ENAC’s active role in developing enabling technologies. Rather than slowing down the sector, he explained, ENAC is building systems to accelerate authorisation, de-risk innovation and scale new use cases.
“According to our National Strategy for Advanced Air Mobility, one of the goals was the creation of a single entry point: a digitalised entry point to digitalise the processes of the public administrations including the authorisation,” he said.
That goal led to HyperTwin, a platform that integrates institutional, private and open-source data to support smarter pre-application risk assessments and provide a collaborative environment for regulators.
The platform uses AI and machine learning and is being qualified by Italy’s Airspace Research Centre to ensure its robustness.
Giovanni emphasised the importance of this kind of transformation: “We need a strict, tight cooperation between industry and regulators in order to enhance BVLOS operations at scale.”
Therefore, as he noted, the industry is responsible for highlighting the needs, while authorities are responsible for guiding the digital transformation.
Affordability and interoperability: Solving the scalability equation
Thomas Jimenez, speaking from the enterprise-facing frontlines at Kongsberg Geospatial, highlighted a different kind of challenge: The cost and fragmentation that undermine scalability.
“We did a webinar some time ago and you started the webinar rightly by saying, ‘BVLOS is done. It’s BVLOS at scale that we’re trying to achieve here,” he noted.
His point was clear: BVLOS is technically proven, but economically limited. Scaling can’t rely on each operator deploying their own equipment.
Instead, services like C2, traffic monitoring, and weather data need to be available on-demand and affordably. But today, integration is the sticking point.
“Every new radar, every new software system, every new weather sensor (…) none of them speak the same language,” he explained. “Every integration is different every single time.”
The solution falls in standardising interfaces and making data services affordable and reusable so that smaller drone service providers (DSPs) can participate in commercial BVLOS activities.
The regulatory paradox of automation and liability
As drone systems become more autonomous, and decision-making shifts away from human pilots, another fundamental question arises: Who is responsible when things go wrong? Where does the liability go?
“If you went to someone in the USA and said, ‘Who’s responsible?’ the ARPIC is responsible is the easy answer,” said Thomas (Kongsberg Geospatial). “That was based on the early days. As the systems become more complex, it’s not fair to place undue responsibility on that pilot.”
Giovanni agreed.
“Uncertainty in liability is a hard barrier for a technology to get to the market. In order to deploy a distributed liability model, we need to clarify exactly the responsibilities of each entity,” he added.
Tools such as the JARUS SORA Annex H are helping, by setting out the roles and responsibilities of service providers offering safety services to drone operations. This is how regulators can support complexity, not resist it.
Conspicuity and shared skies: Cooperation remains a challenge
As questions from the audience turned to uncooperative airspace, panellists acknowledged that visibility and conspicuity remain major hurdles. While technologies like ADS-B are widely used in parts of the world, adoption remains difficult.
“In the US, inside a Mode C veil, you have to broadcast ADS-B,” said Andrew. “That seems quite simple to me. If we could have conspicuity across crewed and uncrewed aircraft, we’d solve a lot of these problems.”
Thomas (Dimetor) pointed to cellular networks as another tool: “In the lower airspace, the cellular contributions for electronic conspicuity can be very significant. ADS-B light over cellular is one step that is certainly contributing.”
Yet, despite these technological options, alignment is far from universal. As Andrew noted, the resistance is often political, not technical; with traditional aviation stakeholders reluctant to adopt solutions that disrupt the status quo.
Ultimately, achieving shared visibility in low-altitude airspace will require more than hardware upgrades. It will depend on policy changes, stakeholder cooperation, and a willingness across the aviation ecosystem to modernise standards and expectations.
What comes next: Data, standards, and long-term thinking
In their closing reflections, the panellists returned to themes of safety, openness and system-wide thinking.
“We would like to have much more data,” said Dr. Selig. “What are really the topics when flying and crashing? Is weather really the main issue? Or is it something else? The learnings are not really shared. That’s something we would like to see more in the future.”
Thomas (Dimetor) called for a digital airspace backbone.
“Getting the digital infrastructure in place and getting information about its performance — weather, connectivity, conspicuity — is one of the fundamental aspects that is required to safely scale operations.”
Giovanni agreed, adding that “this has to be a step-by-step process from a regulatory perspective," as regulators can't put everything in place all at once. He emphasised that this capability needs to be gradually expanded by proving it's safe, secure, and reliable.
Andrew brought it back to industry standards, highlighting the need for interfaces to be defined and flexible.
“Define a baseline interface so that you can actually have people that integrate with one thing and can integrate in lots of places,” he noted.
And Thomas (Kongsberg Geospatial) reminded the audience that innovation is only as impactful as the business case that supports it.
“I try to work very closely with operators and DSPs. The biggest problem I hear is that there’s no ROI. If we make this morbidly expensive, it just won’t work. We need to make it affordable and prove to people like the FAA that we can do this in a safe way,” he explained.
Evidently, the future of BVLOS operations is not just about flying further. It’s about building the systems (digital, legal, procedural, and cultural) that can sustain flight at scale. And that future, as this panel made clear, will be shaped by those who are willing to collaborate, standardise, and share.
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