Leonardo and Heli Protection Europe (HPE) have partnered for drone services for public service customers, Leonardo said at the Paris Air Show. With the partnership, Leonardo hopes to eventually provide surveillance data to customers in the civil airspace using a remotely piloted air vehicle.

Using its Falco family of remotely piloted aircraft, Leonardo has been providing surveillance and imagery services for several years. The company said it served the United Nations during its MonUSCO peacekeeping mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Leonardo designed, manufactured and maintained the aircraft, and also operated the aircraft and interpreted the data. The company hopes this partnership with HPE will help it provide data gathering and management services for firefighting, environmental monitoring, migration flows, humanitarian relief and border control operations.

HPE is a certificated air operator. Leonardo said it hopes to demonstrate that its Falco unmanned vehicles can perform critical operations in accordance with HPE’s safety management system, as well as guidelines from international authorities.

“The partnership is a move toward being able to operate aircraft like the company’s Falco safely in ‘non-segregated’ or civil airspace, allowing Leonardo to bring its drones-as-a-service model to a new set of missions,” Leonardo said. “Falco aircraft can carry payloads such as electro-optical and infrared sensors, radars and hyperspectral cameras, making them well suited to missions including the monitoring of landslides, fires and oil spills and for modern farming techniques.”