BVLOS for Commercial Drone Operations

Elsight's Halo provides BVLOS connectivity confidence required to operate drones and unmanned vehicles beyond visual line of sight

What is BVLOS?

BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight) refers to the operation of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) at distances where the pilot can no longer observe the aircraft with the naked eye. It is considered to be the third and final range of drone operations.

The first range is VLOS (Visual Line Of Sight), where the aircraft is always directly visible to the pilot. The second is EVLOS (Extended Visual Line Of Sight), which enhances the range of drone operations by using one or more trained observers with radio control along the flight path. These additional personnel ensure that the drone is always within direct sight of a human being and can communicate with the pilot.

While EVLOS improves the standard VLOS, it will eventually be limited by the practicality and logistics of chaining together multiple human observation abilities over large distances.

Visual line of sight Extended line of sight Beyond the visual line of sight

VLOS - Visual line of sight EVLOS - Extended visual line of sight BVLOS - Beyond visual line of sight

3000 m+

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Why go BVLOS?

VLOS operations typically limit the distance between an airborne drone and the pilot to around 500 meters. While this distance can vary according to weather and other visibility conditions, the 500m limitation is coded into regulations as a maximum allowable distance in many jurisdictions. If a pilot wishes to extend their mission beyond this range, they must pack up the drone and equipment and redeploy to a new location to work in another area within a 500-meter radius.

This continual redeployment translates into vast amounts of inefficiency and wasted time. It is not practical or commercially viable for many drone use cases, such as package delivery, large-scale precision agriculture, mapping, and surveying critical infrastructure such as roads and railways.

In addition to the distance limitation, VLOS flight prohibits drones from operating behind buildings, trees, and other obstacles that block the pilot’s line of sight, even if the UAV is still within 500 meters of the pilot’s line of sight. This makes urban operations extremely tricky.

In order to unlock the true economic potential of commercial drone operations and allow the industry to scale beyond its current limitations, drone flights must shift to beyond visual line of sight. With BVLOS operation, a single operator can simultaneously supervise and control multiple UAS from a Drone Network Operation Center (DNOC), exponentially increasing the possible UAS applications and distance. BVLOS operation will allow drones to achieve more in a single flight and ultimately enable operators to expand from limited numbers of piloted drone missions to long-distance, fully autonomous drone fleets, providing maximum cost-effectiveness.

Common BVLOS challenges and how to overcome them

Safety

Without the watchful eyes of a pilot or other human observers within visual range, a BVLOS drone platform requires additional solutions that will allow it to avoid collisions with both fixed obstacles and other flying aircraft. While FPV (First-Person View) equipment can be used to transmit a live camera feed of the surrounding area back to an operator, this option provides limited depth perception and peripheral vision. More sophisticated technologies include fully automated detect-and-avoid solutions such as Iris Automation’s Casia, which combines an array of cameras with state-of-the-art computer vision and machine learning to detect and react to any potential obstacles or hazards that may pose a safety threat.

Airspace awareness solutions such as ADS-B (Automatic Dependence Surveillance and Broadcast) or Remote ID may also be required to provide real-time position and speed updates to ATC (Air Traffic Control) and UTM (Unmanned Traffic Management) centers. Remote ID also allows law enforcement and other agencies to locate drone operators in case of an incident or emergency, providing both accountability and traceability.

One of the most essential safety aspects is the ability to maintain communication and control of your drone at all times.

Low SWaP

Designing BVLOS drone platforms to meet a restricted SWaP (size, weight, and power) budget can be challenging. This design challenge is compounded by the fact that many BVLOS drones are expected to fly further and for longer time periods.

Saving SWaP capacity on a new BVLOS drone design may require offloading some onboard processing to an external cloud service. Features that can benefit from cloud services include power-hungry image and sensor data processing and tasks that involve artificial intelligence or machine learning. This data transmission will likely require a high-bandwidth drone datalink that provides an extremely high degree of reliability.

Regulatory approval

Once your drone design has been finalized, the next hurdle along your path to BVLOS operation is gaining approval from your jurisdiction’s aviation authority, such as the United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) or In many jurisdictions around the world, strict regulations limit BVLOS operations and gaining approval is currently a highly involved process.

The FAA’s granted waivers have seen a year-to-year increase. It’s a good indicator of increasing activity in the commercial drone industry, alongside evolving Part 107 waiver rules that eliminate the need for some previously required waivers. The FAA introduced a Type Certification, an approval of an aircraft’s design, including all components, such as engines and flight control systems, based upon a set of airworthiness criteria. It has been used for decades in manned aviation, but only in recent years has the FAA created a version that is applicable to the UAS’s unique needs.

In EASA’s framework, BVLOS flights are categorized under the ‘specific’ category, requiring operators to obtain operational authorization from their National Aviation Authority (NAA) prior to conducting such operations. This process involves a risk assessment to ensure safety and compliance with established standards. The EASA has introduced predefined risk assessments (PDRAs) and standard scenarios (STSs) to streamline the approval process for common BVLOS operations.

Aviation regulation bodies are famously strict when it comes to safety, and even more so when it comes to the relatively new drone industry, which brings distinct issues and requirements to those of manned aviation. The key to successful FAA BVLOS approval is presenting a thorough and convincing safety case for your drone platform. Applications must consider how to maintain drone control at all times, even during changing communications environments, how to detect and avoid potential collisions, and what risk mitigation plans are in place in an emergency. Regulators place a significant emphasis on robust command and control systems for approving BVLOS drone operations. A successful application will require a proven communications system with close to 100% uptime.

One of the first companies in the world to be granted a Type Certificate, and the first to achieve this milestone for an autonomous security and data capture platform, is Elsight’s Halo customer Airobotics. After a rigorous four-year process, the company’s Optimus-1EX system was certified to conduct BVLOS operations over people and public roads without applying for case-by-case waivers.

Ensuring connectivity confidence

BVLOS connectivity options

Reliable connectivity is critical in drone operations, particularly in urban areas, where failure can lead to a high risk of injury and property damage, and in rural and remote areas, where communications networks may be sparse or change often. A BVLOS drone connectivity solution must incorporate multiple communications options and deliver close to 100% uptime to ensure maximum safety and allow the drone to carry out its mission at all times without data transmission loss.

Unlicensed radio-frequency (RF) communication can be easily jammed or hijacked and suffers from range and line-of-sight issues, making it less than ideal as a sole BVLOS connectivity solution. Satellite communication has an excellent range, uptime and comprehensive coverage, but it has high latency issues and is comparatively expensive.

SATCOM terminals are also typically larger and heavier than other communications equipment, making them unsuitable for smaller drone platforms.

The globally deployed mobile networks, such as 4G/LTE and 5G, provide common technological standards and harmonized bands, offering a readily available communication infrastructure and widespread coverage. Drone operators worldwide can connect with their drones over long distances over these networks. Cellular connectivity provides the necessary bandwidth, and the costs are non-prohibitive for drone operators. Cellular modems have minimal impact on the SWaP budget of a wide range of drone platforms. However, reliability issues associated with cellular providers’ low-connectivity zones or dead spots are a potential downside solved by leveraging multiple cellular providers using a multi-SIM solution.

Elsight’s BVLOS connectivity confidence

Elsight’s Halo BVLOS connectivity platform maintains continuous and reliable communications, utilizing multilink communication links (4G/LTE, 5G, Satcom, and proprietary RF channels) coupled with an advanced bonding algorithm to provide a robust, communication-agnostic solution ideal for BVLOS flights.

Halo‘s always-on connectivity is powered by a dynamic bonding mechanism, combining multiple networks into a single logical pipeline. Halo constantly monitors all communication links to identify compromised channels and predict network performance, automatically rerouting traffic in real-time to ensure high bandwidth and uninterrupted transmission of critical video, audio, and Command and Control (C2) data. Furthermore, these multiple datalinks can be aggregated to maximize the amount of available throughput.

Halo’s state-of-the-art connectivity solution provides high reliability and safety, boosting your chances of obtaining regulatory certification for commercial drone operations beyond visual line of sight. To simplify regulatory compliance, Halo-powered Halo-powered heatmaps provide historical data logs, ensuring adherence to “well-connected path” requirements and providing greater operational confidence.

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Related Resources

Guidebook - BVLOS SWaP Guide

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Ebook: BVLOS across the drone industry

The most informative BVLOS vertical ebook that will help you go from limited LOS to exponential business growth

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On-Demand Webinar: Scaling BVLOS UAV operations

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