EUROCONTROL and partners inaugurate the Paris Region Drone Centre of Excellence & open a drone corridor ops room at the EUROCONTROL Innovation Hub

CEDIF, the new Drone Centre (Centre d’Excellence Drones Île de France) is a partnership between Systematic, the Paris Region Deep Tech Ecosystem; industrial giant Thales; and EUROCONTROL with its extensive drone, air traffic management and simulation/validation experience. The Centre aims to provide a complete platform to incubate, validate and industrialise all direct and indirect drone activities. The Centre will be using a 40km drone corridor over cities, rail and road infrastructure south of Paris which will be managed from the new ops room at the EIH.

A simulation platform for validating drone services will also be developed using at the EIH using our unique simulation, validation and UAS experience.

We will be sharing the results and lessons learnt from this initiative within our European U-space innovation network to address the pan-European cooperation dimension.

A huge thankyou to all our partners for the hard work so far to bring this exciting project to life – from the representatives of dozens of innovative startups and small-medium sized enterprises that joined us for the event and participated in panel discussions. The initiative is supported by a range of actors including local government; DGAC, the French civil aviation authority; as well as military stakeholders who joined us at the EIH in Brétigny.