The UK government has just announced the construction of the world’s longest and largest drone “superhighway” in what could be a major shake-up for logistics and delivery workers everywhere.

The 164-mile superhighway, dubbed “Skyway”, will aim to connect towns such as Reading, Oxford, Milton Keynes, Cambridge, Coventry and Rugby, and is set to be completed within the next two years.

The project will be led by Reading-based tech firm UTM (Unified Traffic Management) and software vendor Altitude Angel, alongside BT, EE, and “a number of UK tech start-ups”.

The consortium behind the project said that though drones currently “cannot be flown without a human pilot, except in rare circumstances” the new highway will remove this obstacle “by enabling any drone manufacturer to connect a drone’s guidance and communication systems to a virtual superhighway system which takes care of guiding drones safely through ‘corridors’, onward to their destinations, using only a software integration”.