Future Flight: Strategic Growth

To lead a project your organisation must:

• be a UK registered business of any size
• collaborate with other UK registered organisations
• involve at least one micro, small or medium sized enterprise (SME)

To collaborate with the lead, your organisation must be one of the following UK registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)

A business can only lead on one application but can be included as a collaborator in one further application.

If a business is not leading any application, it can collaborate in two applications.

An academic institution, research and technology organisation (RTO), charity, not for profit or public sector organisation can collaborate in two applications.

We welcome and encourage applications from people of all backgrounds and are committed to making our application process accessible to everyone. This includes making reasonable adjustments, for people who have a disability or a long term condition and face barriers applying to us.

You can contact us at any time to ask for guidance.

We recommend you contact us at least 15 working days before this competition’s closing date to allow us to put the most suitable support in place. The support we can provide may be limited if you contact us close to the competition deadline.

You can contact Innovate UK by email or call 0300 321 4357. Our phone lines are open from 9am to 12pm and 2pm to 5pm UK time, Monday to Friday (excluding bank holidays).

Your project must:

• have a grant funding request of between £250,000 and £500,000
• last between six and seven months
• carry out all of its project work in the UK, unless specifically stated and pre-approved by Innovate UK
• intend to exploit the results from or in the UK
• start on 1 September 2025
• end by 31 March 2026
• ensure any one partner does not account for more than 70% of the total grant requested

The aim of this competition is to accelerate the development of the UK drone sector, creating growth and meeting the objectives of Department for Transport (DfT) Future of Flight Action Plan.

Your project must demonstrate progress towards commercialisation or achievement of routine Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) operations, building on current state of the art approaches.

Your project must deliver either:

• tangible outcomes in new use cases previously at a demonstration phase, or scaling up of existing commercial use cases; these must have strong end user involvement

or

• tangible developments in support of the regulatory policy concepts, or concepts of operation being developed by the Civil Aviation Authority to enable Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems (RPAS); this can include data, testing, concepts of operation or other relevant development and you must be willing to share data and outputs with the CAA

You must include the participation of UK registered end users or operators in your project.

Your project must be developing further maturity against Future Flight Challenge Phase 3, or other industry work. It must not be a repetition of previous work already completed by yourselves or others.

You must detail clearly in your application any dependency on regulatory approvals. You must demonstrate that any required approvals are either already granted or obtainable by a clear and supported route within your project timeline.

To support industry progress and government and regulatory frameworks we ask that the key learnings from your project are shared openly.

Your project can include flight activities where this adds benefit to your project.

We particularly welcome applications that focus on strategically important use cases, for example; medical delivery, inspection of critical infrastructure, maritime, agriculture, support to front line public services.

Your project must focus on one or more of the following:

• use cases that deliver economic and social benefit
• regulatory areas; Electronic Conspicuity (EC), Detect and Avoid (DAA), Multiple Simultaneous Operations (MSO), Uncrewed Traffic Management (UTM) or Atypical Air environments (AAE)

An online briefing will be held at 11am on Monday 19 May: click here for the joining link.

If you would like help to find a collaboration partner, contact Innovate UK Business Connect’s Transport team or Place team.