Where the DRID is deployed

A festival site is where drones and people come closest together. The permit usually prohibits them, the crowd stands shoulder to shoulder, and until recently nobody could establish who was flying.

A solar park is large, empty and remote. Hardly anyone walks around, there are hundreds of thousands of euros of copper and inverters in it, and a ten-minute drone flight shows exactly where that sits and how the fence runs.

A data centre has few people on site and a lot of value inside the fence. Security is built on fences, cameras and access control, and all three look at the ground.

A port or chemical cluster is a site where a small aircraft can have a large consequence. Hazardous materials are handled, sea-going vessels have their own rules, and the site is too large to watch by eye.

At a correctional facility the drone is not a curious visitor but a delivery service. Phones, SIM cards, drugs and sometimes weapons go over the wall, and the aircraft is gone again within a minute.

At an airport the arithmetic is simple: one drone in the wrong place stops traffic, and every minute stopped costs money and confidence. Visibility of what is flying nearby is not a luxury there.

At a defence site the question is rarely whether you want detection, but under what conditions you let a system in. Where does the data sit, who can switch it off, and what happens if the supplier is gone tomorrow.