Menapia joins ARIA’s Enduring Atmospheric Platforms programme to develop CAROUSEL
CAROUSEL brings together aircraft, autonomous operations and regulatory innovation to explore how persistent services in the stratosphere could work at scale.
Menapia has been selected as one of 18 R&D Creator teams in the Advanced Research + Invention Agency’s (ARIA) Enduring Atmospheric Platforms programme.
Our project, CAROUSEL, will explore how fleets of high-altitude multirotor aircraft could provide persistent communications, sensing and other services from the stratosphere. Aircraft would take turns on station, returning to the ground while replacements keep the service available.
Delivering that vision means developing the whole platform: the aircraft, the autonomous systems that coordinate their operation, the ground infrastructure and the regulatory approaches that could make routine deployment possible.
Building a platform that can operate at scale
Developing a new multirotor aircraft to reach the stratosphere is one part of the challenge. Keeping a useful service available, safely and repeatedly, requires much more.
CAROUSEL approaches persistence at fleet level. Individual aircraft could return for recharging, maintenance or a change of payload while others maintain coverage. The platform would need to coordinate those movements, manage changes in weather and keep services running through the handovers.
Those operations must also fit into an airspace system shared with other users. How aircraft access the stratosphere, how their movements are coordinated and how safety is demonstrated are fundamental design questions.
We’re developing the technology and the operational approach together, so that the result has a credible route beyond a demonstration to deployment at scale.
The CAROUSEL concept. A fleet of drones form a Canopy layer in the stratosphere. Blue drone’s ascend to relieve white drone’s on station, orange drones return to land and recharge.
Regulatory innovation is part of the work
For this moonshot to become useful infrastructure, the way we manage and access airspace will need to evolve alongside the aircraft.
CAROUSEL includes work on the regulatory innovation needed for safe, routine autonomous operations. We want to help bring a modernised approach to airspace to life: one that can accommodate new kinds of operation while maintaining safety for everyone using it.
That means developing evidence through modelling, testing and flight operations, and working with regulators and other airspace users to understand how new approaches could work in practice. The technology, safety case and operating framework need to develop together.
An approach suitable for a small number of experimental flights may not support a fleet delivering a continuous service. Addressing that difference is essential to making persistent stratospheric operations viable at scale.
A shared ambition for the stratosphere
Led by Programme Director Rico Chandra, ARIA’s £70 million Enduring Atmospheric Platforms programme brings together 18 teams over 3.5 years.
The programme’s goal is to demonstrate the ability to keep communications payloads powered and on station in the stratosphere above the UK for a week. Success could support a new generation of communications services and extend connectivity to underserved regions.
This is the kind of ambitious research we want to see backed: a difficult, worthwhile problem that needs different disciplines and genuinely different approaches.
Thank you to Rico and the whole ARIA programme team for bringing this together and backing Menapia to take part. There are some seriously impressive Creators in this programme. We’re delighted to be in their company and look forward to seeing what everyone builds.
Building on experience, growing the team
Menapia’s work in atmospheric research has brought aircraft development, autonomous systems and real-world flight operations together. It has also taught us how closely useful capability depends on safety assurance and access to airspace.
CAROUSEL takes that work into a much more demanding environment, with a broader ambition: a platform that can deliver persistent services and a practical path to operating it.
We’re growing the team to help make that happen.
We’d like to hear from people interested in aircraft and propulsion, software and autonomy, systems engineering, safety assurance, regulatory innovation, airspace integration and flight operations. We also welcome people who can connect those disciplines and help turn a complex development programme into an operating service.
Tell us what you’ve built, tested, operated or helped change, and what you’d like to tackle next. You don’t need to wait for a job advert to start a conversation.
Get in touch with Menapia.
Read more about ARIA’s Enduring Atmospheric Platforms programme.