Nothing worked at Frankfurt Airport for three hours.

Planes were diverted, take-offs and landings postponed, and in the end some even had to take off during the normal night's rest.

And all because a drone had been spotted in the airspace of the airport.

The incident a year ago was one of the most serious incidents of this type to date, but not the only one.

Unmanned and remote-controlled aircraft are crossing the airspace of passenger aircraft more and more frequently.

At the same time, drones – unmanned, helicopter-like and mostly battery-powered VTOL aircraft – are no longer just a popular toy for photographers and videographers.

Companies like Wingcopter from Weiterstadt or Volocopter from Bruchsal want to use them to transport packages over longer distances in the medium term.

Falk Heunemann

Business editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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"The drone is becoming a tool, it's no longer a toy," confirms Jan-Eric Putze, a former pilot and now Managing Director of the Frankfurt-based company Droniq.

"And we want to help ensure that drones can be used economically." His start-up, based at the Frankfurt television tower known as "Spargel", wants to ensure that the drones do not collide with each other or with other aircraft.

Droniq wants to set up a kind of air traffic control for unmanned missiles.

That's not unrealistic, because behind the three-year-old start-up with 22 employees are two big industry experts: Deutsche Flugsicherung, which holds 51 percent of Droniq, and Deutsche Telekom.

Define your own flight corridors

And only on Wednesday, Droniq co-founded an Air Mobility Initiative that aims to accelerate the electrification of air traffic.

Its members include Airbus, Deutsche Bahn, Diehl Aerospace, the operating company of Munich Airport and the city of Ingolstadt. It is funded by the state of Bavaria and the federal government with a total of 41 million euros.

In the initiative, Droniq is in charge of “air traffic management”, one of the three task areas that the initiative has set itself.

In principle, the start-up wants to convert drones into flying smartphones.

To do this, they are equipped with an LTE transmitter about the size of a matchbox and a SIM card, which a drone uses to dial into the Telekom mobile network and then continuously transmits its current position.

The data flows into Droniq's traffic management system, which shows users the positions and flight routes of all aircraft via app or software.

In addition, certain areas such as airports can be blocked for overflights and the drones can be guided around them via software control.

The advantage would be that with such a system, each individual flight route would no longer have to be approved separately.

Rather, separate flight corridors would be defined for drones, so-called U-Spaces,