Low-altitude economy, such as drone food delivery, tourism, and emergency rescue, is accelerating its integration into thousands of industries. At the 2024 Low-altitude Economic Development Conference held in Wuhu City, Anhui Province on September 7, 2024, more than 100 low-altitude economic application scenarios were released, covering logistics, cultural tourism, agriculture, smart cities and many other fields.
The application scenarios released this time involve low-altitude infrastructure, operation services, flight support, etc., basically covering the entire industrial chain of the low-altitude economy. Among them, the number of public service application scenarios is the largest, accounting for 50%, followed by production operations, accounting for 31%; from the product side, the demand for drones is the largest, accounting for more than 75%.
Delivery drones are a microcosm of the current development of China's low-altitude economy. The sky below 1,000 meters is experiencing unprecedented busyness. Short-distance air flights have begun to replace high-speed rail and cars on a small scale, and intercity transportation can be shortened from several hours to more than ten minutes. "Airbus" is operating regularly in some places: in April, the first low-altitude short-distance transport route in the Greater Bay Area from Shenzhen to Zhuhai was opened; from mid-August, inter-provincial "flying taxis" have been running between Shanghai and Kunshan, Jiangsu every day.
Express delivery, emergency rescue, medical transportation, fresh cold chain and other transportation that originally required a large amount of ground resources are being disruptively innovated through drones. There are more than 440 drone routes in the country, covering all terrains such as plains, plateaus, mountains, snowy areas and islands, which can deliver goods to places that were previously difficult for humans to reach. Looking up, a low-altitude world that is parallel to the ground and interactive is being rapidly built: intelligent networks with functions such as communication and monitoring services are quietly expanding; more and more drones are transporting goods and inspecting roads... The application scenarios of "low altitude +" have opened up new space for innovative economy.
It is estimated that the scale of my country's low-altitude economy will exceed 500 billion yuan in 2023 and is expected to exceed 2 trillion yuan in 2030. The low-altitude economy was written into the government work report for the first time this year, and the Third Plenary Session of the 20th CPC Central Committee also specifically mentioned the development of the low-altitude economy. From cities such as Shanghai, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and Chengdu to the Yangtze River Delta, the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, and the Northeast, many places have competed to become "Sky Cities".
