The Smart Skies Healthy Waters initiative has been awarded £6 million as a headline winner of Ofwat’s fifth Water Breakthrough Challenge, aiming to revolutionize coastal water quality monitoring in the UK. Led by Northumbrian Water in collaboration with ARPAS-UK Member Skyports Drone Services, Makutu, Newcastle University, and Proteus Instruments, the project introduces a novel approach by integrating automated drones, advanced sensors, and cloud-based analytics to deliver near real-time water quality data.
Traditional water monitoring methods are often labor-intensive and infrequent. This project addresses these limitations by deploying drones equipped with sampling and analysis sensors directly over waterways. Collected samples are analyzed on-site using “lab-in-a-box” units, significantly reducing the time to obtain results from days to mere minutes. The data is then made publicly accessible, empowering communities with timely information about coastal water health.


“This project provides a ground-breaking opportunity to harness new technologies to enable more frequent monitoring of our bathing waters. This project will be a world first and a step change for our sector, helping to ensure healthier waters for our customers communities and our environment.“ Richard Warneford, Wastewater Director, Northumbrian Water (Smart Skies, Healthy Waters lead partner)
Alex Brown, Director of Drone Services, Skyports, said: “Monitoring and improving the UK’s water quality is so important to all of us. With drones we can reach further, more frequently and provide better insights compared to the normal way of collecting water samples. We started working with Northumbria Water and Makutu two years ago with our first water monitoring service, and this is the latest milestone to take this service to the next step. In the future we see a large network of water monitoring drones flying Beyond Visual Line of Sight around key water sites in the UK, providing instant insights back to Northumbrian Water, as well as other utilities, allowing them to take action where required to keep our waterways clean.”
David Black, CEO of Ofwat said: “Water underpins our society and economy, and the water sector faces a range of challenges requiring urgent solutions. The Ofwat Innovation Fund was established five years ago to incentivise the water sector to collaborate with partners across industry, charities, and academia to accelerate the pace of transformation and create lasting benefits for customers and the environment. The level of ambition of this year’s winners is remarkable. We are supporting these projects to prove their impact so that they can be scaled, not only here in England and Wales, but exported around the world as a driver of economic growth”.
Makutu contributes its expertise in cloud-native data platforms, AI, and IoT to power the real-time data infrastructure, transforming raw sensor inputs into actionable insights. Skyports, known for operating long-range automated drones, provides the necessary infrastructure and regulatory knowledge to facilitate these complex operations.
21 May 2025
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