August 27, 2025
Airborne solutions to waterborne problems – drones’ potential for UK Water
By Peter Stirratt, Head of Inspection & Survey, Skyports Drone Services
As the UK experiences the driest start to the year since 1976, and with the UK’s water shortfall declared “nationally significant”, the issue of water security has come increasingly into focus. Reservoir levels in parts of the UK are close to record lows, against a backdrop of the UK also dealing with an ageing water infrastructure which loses 3 billion litres of water a day to leaks.
Compounded with the hot weather (the UK just experienced the hottest June on record, and August marks our fourth heatwave), there are some big questions as to how the UK can look to improve and maintain its existing water infrastructure, especially as hotter and dryer summers appear to become the norm.
Beyond the amount of water we’re consuming, there are also questions over the quality of the water in our waterways – which has been a well-publicised topic over the last few years.
For both issues, there is big potential for the use of drones through their inspection and survey capabilities.
Drones for monitoring reservoir levels and health
As we enter the second half of summer, and with August set to be another dry month, we’ll become increasingly reliant on our reservoirs. But monitoring and maintaining the health of reservoirs is a tricky business, which requires a lot of man hours and carries with it a certain amount of human risk.
One way that this process can be improved is through automated drone monitoring and surveillance, where drones fly a daily automated route, providing an aerial view of the reservoirs, monitoring water levels and identifying any issues.
This is a service Skyports has been successfully providing in Singapore for a number of years, helping Singapore Public Utilities board to monitor the health of its reservoirs quickly and more economically, allowing it to reallocate funds from manual reservoir inspections to the maintenance of its network – a welcome alternative to raising bills for customers.
Whilst the UK airspace regulatory environment is behind that of Singapore, there is a proven benefit here that the UK could take advantage of. The good news is that as the Civil Aviation Authority progresses towards opening our airspace to facilitate drones flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight, skies and water could be beginning to align.
Drones for inspecting water pipelines and identifying leaks
With the dry hot weather the usual green fields that the UK is famous for have turned golden yellow.
This parched ground does offer a silver lining however. For where there are water leaks from subterranean water pipes, there are often telltale spots of luscious green grass.
Whilst not immediately obvious from the ground, viewed from the air, and accompanied by a map of the water pipes, it becomes easy to identify areas of damaged pipe to be repaired.
There is a large potential for drones here – whilst surveys like this are currently carried out by light aircraft, there are obviously considerable costs. By using an automated drone, which is programmed to follow the subterranean pipeline, these insights could be gained comparatively quickly and cost effectively, whilst also creating a repeatable data log of the area that could be compared year on year, helping to identify any new leaks.
Drones for monitoring the quality of water in waterways
It’s a well-known fact that the quality of the water in parts of the UK’s waterways is substandard – a situation that the regulators and water companies are working hard to improve.
During the summer months, when it does rain, it tends to be in heavy downpours, which has the potential to overwhelm sewage systems and lead to spills in waterways. Post downpour as the weather clears, it is vital for public safety that water companies can monitor water quality and issue any warnings should bodies of water be of an unsafe quality for swimming. But taking water quality samples by hand is a slow process that can carry risks, and the lab results can take days to process.
Luckily, drones can again offer a solution here, and is something we are actively involved in with the Smart Skies, Healthy Waters project, which is supported by Ofwat and carried out in partnership with Kohtari & Northumbrian Water, Proteus Instruments and the University of Newcastle.
In this project, our drones are used to fly over waterways in Northumbria, dropping water sampling equipment directly into the waterflow. The water is then analysed remotely, with the data being sent to the cloud for processing in near real-time. From there, if issues are identified, water companies can then issue public warnings and respond to the risks.
Making drones the guardian angels of UK water
Whilst there are various hurdles relating to airspace regulations that need to be overcome to make all of these use cases a reality in the UK, the technology is already there, and there are clear benefits that drones can provide to the UK’s water systems.
The good news is that the UK’s airspace regulators are starting to take a more progressive view, and we continue to win new regulatory approvals that bring us closer to making these environmental drone surveillance projects a reality.
It’s looking promising that in the near future we’ll be able to make the above drone solutions a widespread reality here in the UK, and play our part in keeping the UK’s water supply safe and secure.
You can find out more about Skyports’ drone surveillance and monitoring solutions here.