Announcing SafeSky Sentinel: Bringing SafeSky Traffic Awareness to Drone Operators, both ways !

2 hours ago

4 min read

A free, dedicated application giving drone crews in the field real-time awareness of surrounding low-altitude traffic, and helping make their operations visible to the wider aviation community through the SafeSky Network.

SafeSky Sentinel with crewed traffic proximity alerts

For every drone operator, one question remains fundamental throughout an operation: what else is flying around us?

This becomes particularly important at low altitude, where drone operations share airspace with helicopters, light aircraft, ultralights, gliders, paramotors, balloons and, increasingly, other drones.

Maintaining awareness of this surrounding traffic is an essential part of safe drone operations. Whether flying VLOS or BVLOS, operators need a practical way to monitor relevant air traffic, identify a potential conflict early, and give the remote pilot enough time to apply the appropriate procedure.

With SafeSky Sentinel, drone operators now have a dedicated tool for exactly that purpose.

Bringing the SafeSky traffic picture into the field

SafeSky Sentinel is a free app designed specifically to give drone crews direct access to the traffic-awareness capabilities of the SafeSky Network during their operations.

The SafeSky Network brings together real-time traffic information from more than 30 different sources, creating a comprehensive picture of cooperative air traffic with a particular strength in the low-altitude environment where drones operate. (More information here: https://www.safesky.app/3rdparty)

This matters because the traffic of greatest relevance to a drone operation is not necessarily limited to commercial aviation or aircraft visible through conventional surveillance infrastructure.

For example, a helicopter conducting a low-level mission, an ultralight crossing the area, a glider descending nearby, a paramotor, a general aviation aircraft, balloon or another cooperative drone can all become relevant traffic.

SafeSky brings these different sources together into one shared traffic picture.

Drone operators have already been using the Web SafeSky Live interface to monitor this traffic.

Making drones visible

Some professional platforms—including DJI FlightHub 2, RigiTech, FlytBase, DroneSense and Dronetag, and more to come, already provide direct access to SafeSky traffic information within their control centres. A seamless direct integration is also possible via the SafeSky professional UAV API.

Until now, however, many drone pilots did not have access to this capability.

SafeSky Sentinel takes the concept further by putting a dedicated operational traffic-monitoring application directly into the hands of the drone crew in the field.

Drone traffic made visible in SafeSky Live

A dedicated traffic monitor for the drone crew

During drone operations, responsibilities are often distributed across the crew.

While the remote pilot concentrates on controlling the aircraft and conducting the mission, another crew member is responsible for monitoring the surrounding airspace and alerting the pilot when relevant traffic approaches.

SafeSky Sentinel is designed around this operational reality.

The person responsible for traffic monitoring can maintain a live radar-style view of surrounding cooperative traffic directly on a mobile device. Operators can define traffic thresholds based on parameters such as horizontal distance and relative altitude, with different levels for information, warning and danger.

SafeSky Sentinel continuously monitors the surrounding traffic picture against these thresholds.

When an aircraft becomes relevant to the operation, visual and audible alerts draw the crew’s attention to the developing situation.

The result is more than a traffic map. It provides a proactive traffic-awareness capability, helping the crew identify relevant traffic early and giving the remote pilot more time to respond according to the operation’s procedures.

See, and be seen

Traffic awareness should not work in only one direction. While SafeSky Sentinel enables the drone crew to see participating traffic around the operation, the drone operator can also share the area of operation with the SafeSky Network.

This creates the foundation for a collaborative See and Be Seen environment.

The drone crew gains awareness of relevant participating air traffic around its operation. In return, the drone operation becomes part of the shared SafeSky Network traffic picture.

Participating pilots and compatible systems connected to the SafeSky Network can therefore become aware of the drone activity and receive relevant traffic information and alerts directly in the cockpit.

This two-way exchange is particularly important as crewed and uncrewed aviation increasingly share the same low-altitude airspace.

Rather than each community operating with a separate picture of the sky, SafeSky provides a means for both to contribute to—and benefit from—a common traffic-awareness network.

A drone alert from the SafeSky App to an ultralight pilot

Supporting more demanding operations and SORA safety cases

For operators seeking authorisation for more complex missions, particularly BVLOS operations, demonstrating how air risk is identified and mitigated can be an important part of the operational safety case. Under frameworks such as SORA, operators need to document the airspace environment, evaluate the risk of encountering crewed aircraft and describe the strategic and tactical mitigations used to manage that risk.

Access to relevant traffic information, combined with clearly defined monitoring, alerting and response procedures, can contribute to this broader safety strategy where appropriate to the operation and accepted by the competent authority.

SafeSky Sentinel gives operators a practical capability that can be incorporated into their Concept of Operations (ConOps), operating procedures and documented air-risk mitigation strategy.

This can help operators demonstrate how they maintain traffic awareness during an operation and may help address operational constraints that would otherwise make more demanding missions difficult to authorise.

Sentinel does not replace a SORA assessment, provide separation from other aircraft or guarantee an operational authorisation. Instead, it provides an additional traffic-awareness capability that operators can integrate into a wider, documented safety framework.

A shared traffic picture for low-altitude aviation

By giving drone crews direct access to the SafeSky Network while allowing them to contribute their own operation to the shared traffic picture, Sentinel represents a significant step towards more collaborative low-altitude airspace.

Combined with SafeSky’s growing integrations across professional drone platforms, Sentinel makes this shared traffic picture accessible from the control centre all the way to the crew in the field.

The principle is deliberately simple:

See the traffic around your drone operation. Make your operation visible to others.
SafeSky Sentinel is available free of charge for iOS and Android.