Drone trial to help improve water quality has started in Northumberland

Following initial test flights in Bishop Auckland, County Durham, earlier this year, Northumbrian Water, Makutu, RS Hydro and Skyports Drone Services have announced that their trial is being expanded across the North East to demonstrate how drone operations can enable water companies to proactively respond to issues, enhance worker safety and make it faster, cheaper and easier to gather water quality data in hard-to-reach areas.

This includes a series of drone flights in the area of the River Coquet Estuary and river that are now underway.

Northumbrian Water currently relies on manual collection of water samples by staff, which can be challenging or simply not possible in hard-to-reach locations. In some cases, the travel to distant sites can take several hours, making the process time-consuming and inefficient.

Since the initial flights at the beginning of 2024, Project Kingfisher partners have implemented several key learnings and changes to facilitate more robust operations.

Flights will be conducted by drone operator partner Skyports Drone Services, which will deploy an all-electric multirotor aircraft currently capable of travelling distances of up to 20km on a single charge.

The UAV has been equipped with a variety of sensors that are lowered into the sample points by a winch, where a number of water quality parameters are sampled in situ. The data is then provided in real time as a data feed to Northumbrian Water.

Project Kingfisher, which was given its name for the way the aircraft hover and dip in and out of water, has already seen strong initial results and the partners hope that the trials will demonstrate the feasibility of using drones for supporting business operations and improving sustainability and water health.

John Edwards, technical policy manager at Northumbrian Water, said: “We have been engaging with customers in the relevant areas and we know that water quality is an incredibly important topic at the moment, so it’s great that we are able to use these innovative trials to get valuable data at our regional coasts and rivers.

“This is an incredibly exciting project and hopefully the success of these trials will enable us to carry out more on a larger scale in the future.”