Ameriflight Gains FAA Approval to Operate Matternet M2 Delivery Drones Across U.S

Amer­i­flight, the largest Part 135 car­go air­line in the U.S, received approval from the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA) this week, to oper­ate deliv­ery drone air­craft, mak­ing the com­pa­ny the first Part 135 car­go air­line to receive such exemp­tion, reports a press release.

The release states, ”The new­ly grant­ed exemp­tion allows Amer­i­flight to con­duct unmanned air­craft sys­tem (UAS) oper­a­tions under its cur­rent Part 119 Air Car­ri­er Cer­tifi­cate for Part 135 oper­a­tions. More­over, the com­pa­ny has approval to add the Mat­ter­net M2 to its avi­a­tion fleet, enabling the launch of the first ful­ly oper­a­tional, large-scale drone oper­a­tion in the Unit­ed States.”

Through this part­ner­ship with Mat­ter­net, Amer­i­flight intends to oper­ate the M2 drone for com­mer­cial deliv­ery, focus­ing on health­care and e‑commerce deliv­er­ies to cus­tomers locat­ed in dense urban and sub­ur­ban envi­ron­ments across the coun­try.

Mat­ter­net Deliv­ery Drone Hub

U.S‑based Mat­ter­net first received approval from the FAA for its Mod­el M2 drone design, last Sep­tem­ber, the first non-mil­i­tary unmanned air­craft to achieve such Type Cer­ti­fi­ca­tion. Two months lat­er, the com­pa­ny was grant­ed a Pro­duc­tion Cer­tifi­cate.

Mat­ter­net had been test­ing its M2 autonomous drone over the pre­vi­ous four years in the U.S as part of the FAA’s Unmanned Air­craft Sys­tem (UAS) pro­gram. The M2 has been designed for a large scale ser­vice with a recent FAA waiv­er allow­ing oper­a­tion of up to 20 drones by a sin­gle pilot at the com­pa­ny’s Cal­i­for­nia test facil­i­ty.

The release con­tin­ues, “Amer­i­flight will deploy the M2 fleet of drones using Matternet’s soft­ware plat­form from a cen­tral remote net­work oper­a­tions cen­tre, allow­ing the com­pa­ny to safe­ly expand its net­work, while main­tain­ing the high­est lev­el of pilot oper­a­tor super­vi­sion and flex­i­bil­i­ty. Amer­i­flight intends to oper­ate its UAS as a sup­ple­ment to its manned fly­ing air­craft oper­a­tions.”

Alan Rusi­nowitz, Pres­i­dent and CEO of Amer­i­flight com­ment­ed, “As the only unmanned air­craft with both FAA Type and Pro­duc­tion cer­tifi­cates, we are now turn­ing our focus to scal­ing our oper­a­tions across the U.S. and expand­ing into e‑commerce, while doing so safe­ly and cost- effec­tive­ly. Launch­ing a UAS divi­sion allows us to expand our ser­vice offer­ings to off-air­port alter­na­tive sites for time-sen­si­tive small pack­age needs.”

Alan Rusi­nowitz (Credit: Amer­i­flight)

He con­tin­ued, “Matternet’s tech­nol­o­gy is at the fore­front of autonomous inno­va­tion and pro­vides a rev­o­lu­tion­ary solu­tion for cus­tomers. We’re look­ing for­ward to launch­ing our first M2 flights very soon, and, as we move for­ward into future flights, devel­op­ing addi­tion­al areas of drone deliv­ery.”

Med­ical sam­ples and small batch phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals are to be the ini­tial car­go for the M2, offer­ing a solu­tion to the often slow and unpre­dictable deliv­ery times of present road trans­porta­tion. Using the drone will result in increased speed of deliv­ery and reli­a­bil­i­ty.

Jim Martell, Own­er and Chair­man of Amer­i­flight, remarked, “Mov­ing for­ward with our new­ly oper­a­tive UAS divi­sion allows us to expand into a large­ly untapped deliv­ery mar­ket with a lot of room for speed and safe­ty logis­tic improve­ments.”

Andreas Rap­topou­los, co-Founder and CEO of Mat­ter­net added, “This part­ner­ship enables us to offer our cus­tomers turnkey access to fast and reli­able on-demand deliv­ery capa­bil­i­ties today. This is not a test pro­gram or a future deploy­ment con­cept – this is the real, scal­able, and safe drone-based solu­tion that cus­tomers are look­ing for.”

Andreas Rap­topou­los

This marks Ameriflight’s third announce­ment this year regard­ing its expan­sion into the deliv­ery drone indus­try after hav­ing signed with Sabrew­ing Air­craft on the pur­chase of its Rhaegal‑A air­craft, a 1‑ton pay­load, medi­um-haul feed­er uncrewed aer­i­al vehi­cle, and Natilus on the pur­chase of its Kona air­craft, a 3.8‑ton pay­load, short-haul feed­er uncrewed aer­i­al vehi­cle.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://mttr.net

https://w3.ameriflight.com/

(Images: Mat­ter­net)