Port Authority of New York and Skyports Drone Services to begin yearlong cargo drone trial between Manhattan and Brooklyn

The Port Author­i­ty of New York and New Jer­sey and Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices have announced that tri­al flights using a small uncrewed air­craft to car­ry light car­go between low­er Man­hat­tan and the Brook­lyn Marine Ter­mi­nal will begin on Mon­day for 12 months.

The flights are sched­uled to oper­ate week­days on a fixed route entire­ly over water, away from res­i­den­tial build­ings and under the super­vi­sion of a cer­ti­fied drone pilot with the approval of the Fed­er­al Avi­a­tion Admin­is­tra­tion (FAA).

The year­long tri­al will be the lat­est in the Port Authority’s work to assess the via­bil­i­ty of drone car­go routes that may one day be used to deliv­er goods for pub­lic ben­e­fit around the region as a means of remov­ing vehi­cles from con­gest­ed roads, sup­port­ing low-car­bon deliv­ery meth­ods and seek­ing alter­na­tives to tra­di­tion­al mid­dle-mile deliv­ery of goods.

It fol­lows a short­er two-week proof-of-con­cept test that was con­duct­ed in Jan­u­ary by Sky­ports, in part­ner­ship with the Port Author­i­ty and the New York City Eco­nom­ic Devel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (NYCDEC), using the same route, sched­ule and small uncrewed air­craft.

Port Author­i­ty Chair­man Kevin O’Toole, said: ““The Port Author­i­ty has put small uncrewed air­craft to use for pub­lic ser­vice for many years already, from help­ing in demo­li­tion and con­struc­tion of mega-struc­tures around the region to the main­te­nance of our marine facil­i­ties from the water line up to the tallest heights of our bridges’ cables and tow­ers.

“More than 75 years ago, the Port Author­i­ty rev­o­lu­tion­ized how the entire world moves goods for com­merce with the inven­tion of con­tainer­ized ship­ping at Port Newark. Now we are lay­ing the ground­work for the next gen­er­a­tion of car­go deliv­ery in this region.”

The Port Author­i­ty entered into a part­ner­ship with inter­na­tion­al drone oper­a­tor Sky­ports in 2024, after Sky­ports respond­ed to a 2023 agency request seek­ing oper­a­tors inter­est­ed in mak­ing drone car­go deliv­ery a real­i­ty in the region.

Dur­ing its upcom­ing year­long tri­al in New York City, a Sky­ports drone will con­duct mul­ti­ple round-trip flights every week­day from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. across the East Riv­er between the Down­town Sky­port and the Brook­lyn Marine Ter­mi­nal, both of which are man­aged by NYCEDC on behalf of New York City.

The tri­al will fly non­haz­ardous, non-sen­si­tive, non-bio­log­i­cal car­go such as light phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals for a non-prof­it health sys­tem in New York City, with the goal to assess the impact and inte­gra­tion of drone deliv­er­ies for med­ical car­go on improv­ing patient out­comes.

Port Author­i­ty Exec­u­tive Direc­tor Kathryn Gar­cia, said: “The move­ment of goods and peo­ple has changed dra­mat­i­cal­ly in the past cen­tu­ry since the Port Author­i­ty was found­ed, but there is always one con­stant: we are always at the fore­front, whether it was build­ing the world’s longest sus­pender bridge or oper­at­ing the world’s busiest bus ter­mi­nal.

“As the oper­a­tor of this region’s net­work of air­ports, we are build­ing on our expe­ri­ence and rela­tion­ships to make drone car­go deliv­ery a real­i­ty so that the entire region can ben­e­fit from few­er deliv­ery vehi­cles on con­gest­ed city streets and few­er emis­sions in the air we all breathe.”

Due to the Man­hat­tan take­off site’s prox­im­i­ty to oth­er types of air­craft, mar­itime ves­sels and infra­struc­ture such as fer­ry land­ings, Sky­ports will com­ply with NYCEDC guide­lines as well as FAA reg­u­la­tions with­in one of the world’s busiest water­ways and most com­plex air­spaces that includes the Port Authority’s net­work of air­ports. It also will com­ply with oth­er reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies that secure and pro­tect New York City’s har­bor, such as the New York Police Depart­ment, the Fire Depart­ment of New York and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Pri­or to the start of the year­long test, the Port Author­i­ty, Sky­ports and NYCEDC con­duct­ed exten­sive out­reach to local com­mu­ni­ties, elect­ed offi­cials and mar­itime stake­hold­ers to address con­cerns sur­round­ing the test flights.

 Jean­ny Pak, inter­im pres­i­dent & CEO of NYCEDC, added: “NYCEDC is lead­ing the charge in a trans­porta­tion rev­o­lu­tion, lever­ag­ing New York City’s assets to reimag­ine the ways the city moves goods and peo­ple – mak­ing this drone pilot a real­i­ty.

“Work­ing along­side our pub­lic and pri­vate part­ners, we are trans­form­ing the city’s water­front – includ­ing the Brook­lyn Marine Ter­mi­nal and Down­town Sky­port – into cut­ting-edge mul­ti­modal hubs for sus­tain­able tran­sit and last mile deliv­ery. These efforts are shift­ing the move­ment of goods from our city streets to our water­ways and skies, paving the way for clean­er, more sus­tain­able trans­porta­tion and deliv­ery of goods through­out the region.”

The upcom­ing year­long tri­al of the Sky­ports drone is based on the results from a pre­vi­ous suc­cess­ful proof-of-con­cept test in Jan­u­ary 2026, when the drone com­plet­ed 135 flights, cov­ered 151 miles and trans­port­ed a total of 252 pounds of dum­my car­go.

Each one-way trip between Man­hat­tan and Brook­lyn took an aver­age of 4 min­utes, com­pared to the same trip by vehi­cle that would have tak­en up to 20 min­utes. The total dis­tance trav­eled by the drone would have saved a vehi­cle from dri­ving up to 660 miles or using 40 gal­lons of gas. Even with inclement weath­er dur­ing the dura­tion of the two-week test in Jan­u­ary, 96 per­cent of expect­ed flights were com­plet­ed.

At the con­clu­sion of the year­long tri­al, the Port Author­i­ty and Sky­ports will assess the val­ue, via­bil­i­ty and impact of the tri­al and whether it could be expand­ed to cov­er sim­i­lar car­go drone routes in the region.

Sky­ports and the pri­vate New York health­care sys­tem will also eval­u­ate the service’s impact on patient out­comes and the pos­si­bil­i­ty of imple­ment­ing a per­ma­nent, reg­u­lar­ly sched­uled car­go drone ser­vice.

The Port Authority’s car­go drone tri­al flights align with New York City’s ongo­ing efforts to shift freight from the city’s road­ways to the water and sky through use of water­front sites such as those in these tri­al flights.

U.K.-based Sky­ports oper­ates deliv­ery and inspec­tion drone ser­vices around the world. Since 2023, it has been pro­vid­ing mid­dle-mile drone deliv­er­ies in Scot­land for Roy­al Mail, using drones to deliv­er mail to rur­al, remote areas, and in Ger­many where its drones deliv­ered crit­i­cal car­go to off­shore wind tur­bines for RWE.

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices’ CEO Alex Brown, said: “Around the world, drones have proven them­selves an effec­tive tool for get­ting crit­i­cal car­go from A to B, pro­vid­ing a quick­er and clean­er alter­na­tive to reg­u­lar road trans­port.

“Whether it’s tra­vers­ing heavy traf­fic or tough ter­rain, drones have real poten­tial to improve mid­dle-mile logis­tics. We look for­ward to demon­strat­ing their poten­tial in New York over the next 12 months, help­ing to take vehi­cles off the road and improve the lev­el of care pro­vid­ed to med­ical patients.”

In April 2025, NYCEDC announced Down­town Sky­port LLC — a joint ven­ture between Sky­ports Infra­struc­ture (Sky­ports) and Groupe ADP — as the new oper­a­tor of the Down­town Sky­port, with a goal to trans­form the site into a mul­ti­modal hub of trans­porta­tion, ready to move goods and peo­ple sus­tain­ably by water and by air. In Sep­tem­ber 2025, a $3.5 bil­lion vision plan was advanced to reimag­ine the Brook­lyn Marine Ter­mi­nal into a mod­ern, all-elec­tric mar­itime hub and vibrant mixed-use com­mu­ni­ty.