NATIONAL DRONE SUPERHIGHWAY · MASTER PLAN
The sky, given lanes.
Project Meridian is DroneOD’s plan for a national automated drone superhighway: managed virtual corridors that let operators fly beyond visual line of sight across Britain — safely, openly, and without specialist hardware on the aircraft.
DRONEOD UTM · LIVE MODEL
REV 07.2026
EDINBURGH
MANCHESTER
BIRMINGHAM
CAMBRIDGE
BRISTOL
LONDON
1,180 KM · 19 CITIES
FULL NETWORK TARGET
1,180
KM · FULL NETWORK TARGET
19
CITIES CONNECTED
146
ARROW SENSOR TOWERS
22K
BVLOS FLIGHTS / DAY
§ 01 — THE THESIS
A road network for the air.
Britain built canals, then railways, then motorways. Each moved goods faster by giving traffic dedicated, managed lanes. Meridian does the same for uncrewed aircraft.
Today, an aircraft beyond the pilot’s eyeline is treated as an exception: individually permissioned, individually supervised, and effectively grounded when it leaves a small approved area. The bottleneck is not the aircraft. It is the airspace. Meridian turns ad-hoc journeys into managed traffic on fixed corridors, watched end-to-end by a ground-based sensor grid.
01 / OPEN
Any drone, any approved operator.
02 / GROUND-SMART
Detect-and-avoid carried by the network.
03 / ASSURED
A safety case the regulator can audit.
§ 02 — BENCHMARK
Pilot proof, national ambition.
Project Skyway proved the concept: a 265 km corridor, six cities, ground-based detect-and-avoid, and no onboard hardware requirement. Meridian turns that proven spine into national infrastructure.
DIMENSION
SKYWAY / PILOT
MERIDIAN / PLAN
Network length
265 km spine
1,180 km national backbone
Cities connected
6 operational cities
19 city economies
Automation
Supervised BVLOS trials
Automated BVLOS, exception-led
Sensor grid
≈ 29 ARROW-class towers
146 towers, overlapping cover
§ 03 — PHASED BUILD
One spine, then the nation.
The build starts where Skyway left off and grows outward along Britain’s busiest medical and logistics routes first.
01 / 2026—2029
The Spine
Activate the 265 km Reading–Oxford–Milton Keynes–Cambridge–Coventry–Rugby corridor as a live public service.
265 KM / 6 CITIES / 29 TOWERS
02 / 2030—2036
South & East
Extend to London, Southampton, Bristol and Ipswich, adding the coast-to-coast option and the first medical express lane.
540 KM / 11 CITIES / 68 TOWERS
03 / 2037—2046
National & North
Build the northern backbone through Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds and Newcastle, then close the Scotland link to Edinburgh and Glasgow.
1,180 KM / 19 CITIES / 146 TOWERS
§ 04 — CORRIDOR ARCHITECTURE
A corridor is more than a line.
Meridian corridors use stacked altitude bands and directional traffic decks, with a protected express lane for medical and emergency operations.
800—1,000 FT / PRIORITY EXPRESS
medical / emergency
600—800 FT / LOGISTICS NORTHBOUND
cargo / parcels
400—600 FT / LOGISTICS SOUTHBOUND
cargo / parcels
200—400 FT / SEPARATION BUFFER
safe descent volume
0—200 FT / GROUND RISK ZONE
pads / vertiports only
Corridor width
400 m core + buffer
Detect-and-avoid
ground-based
Traffic separation
dynamic / load-adjusted
Command-link target
99.9% / 50 ms
§ 05 — UNIFIED TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT
The software that runs the sky.
Every Meridian flight passes through the same layered system — from route authorisation before take-off to pre-computed contingency landing when something fails mid-corridor.
L1
Strategic / flight authorisation & 4D routing
PRE-FLIGHT
L2
Tactical / ground detect-and-avoid
SUB-SECOND
L3
Conformance / live geofencing
CONTINUOUS
L4
Contingency / safe-land & return-to-launch
FAIL-SAFE
§ 06 — WHAT FLIES
Priority lanes, real cargo.
Medical and emergency traffic ride a protected express lane. Everything else uses dedicated logistics decks built for routine volume.
PRIORITY EXPRESS
Medical & organ transport
Time-critical bloods, samples, organs, and pharmacy between hospitals — minutes, not hours.
PRIORITY EXPRESS
Emergency response & SAR
First-look aerial imagery, rapid supply drops, and search-and-rescue overwatch dispatched on demand.
LOGISTICS DECK
E-commerce & logistics
Parcel and cargo between depots and towns, at the volume that makes the network pay for itself.
LOGISTICS DECK
Survey & mapping
Photogrammetry and LiDAR runs across long routes — work that line-of-sight rules make impossible today.
§ 07 — SAFETY & ASSURANCE
Safe enough to be boring.
A network becomes infrastructure only if the regulator, public, and other airspace users can trust it on every flight. Meridian’s safety case is designed to be visible and auditable.
99.9%
COMMAND-LINK RELIABILITY
2+
INDEPENDENT LINK PATHS
100%
SENSOR COVERAGE
0
UNCONTAINED FLIGHTS
§ 08 — ROADMAP
From spine to nation.
2026
Programme start — ARROW-grid deployment and spine integration begin along Reading–Rugby.
2029
Full spine service — supervision moves by exception and the medical express opens.
2036
Southern network complete — 540 km, 11 cities, and cross-network medical express live.
2046
National network complete — 1,180 km, 19 cities, 146 towers: Britain’s drone superhighway.
§ 09 — THE ASK
Britain built the railways first. Let’s do it again.
Project Meridian is a phased, twenty-year national build. The spine can be flying within three years.
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