Report: Unmanned Traffic Management Market to Hit $2B by 2025

The rise of unmanned traffic management systems is a big deal and a new market report predicts the deal is about to get bigger.

Research firm ReportLinker this week released a study stating the unmanned traffic management market could reach $538.2 million by year’s end with a projected growth level to almost $2 billion by 2025 — at a growth rate of 20.28 percent from 2018 to 2025.

“The growth of this segment can be attributed to the increased use of UTM services in various application areas, such as weather, flight information, emergency response, network and connectivity, and communication,” the report states.

The term UTM describes a broad range of concepts and solutions designed to facilitate air-traffic management among drones and manned aircraft in an effort to avoid potential crashes or other dangers.

The report adds:

“The communication infrastructure segment is estimated to lead the unmanned traffic management market during the forecast period. The growth of this segment is driven by the varied use of communication infrastructures, such as data link communication, wireless communication, drone-to-drone communication, and data exchange, for the safe operation of unmanned air vehicles.”

The study also predicts the surveillance and monitoring segment of UTM will experience the highest growth rate over all due to rising use by law-enforcement and other security players.

Not surprisingly, North America is expected to lead the charge due to the “increasing investments in the development of UTM solutions by government agencies and private players from the US and Canada are expected to boost the market growth.”

As noted in a previous DroneLife post:

“UTM is big.  It’s complex.  Many of the participants in UTM testing are the giants of a commercial drone industry: Amazon, Google, companies need to understand UTM in order to coordinate the huge efforts of large scale delivery and Fortune 100 drone implementations.”

In March, NASA completed test runs for a new UTM program, taking the agency’s  UTM test process to the next level.

Earlier this year, Belgian company Unifly and Danish start-up Integra Aviation Academy announced the launch of a new UTM system that can detect, monitor and document drone flights near key infrastructure locations (especially airports) on a national scale.