SkyDrop to Begin Regular Drone Deliveries After Final Approval from New Zealand’s CAA

Sky­Drop (for­mer­ly named Flirtey), announced this week it has received Part 102 approval from New Zealand’s Civ­il Avi­a­tion Author­i­ty (CAA) to launch SkyDrop’s first drone hub in Hunt­ly, New Zealand, reports a press release.

The Kongs­berg Geospatial’s IRIS Ground Con­trol Sta­tion appli­ca­tion has been imple­ment­ed, enabling the com­pa­ny to con­duct sub­ur­ban drone deliv­ery oper­a­tions in Hunt­ly. Sky­Drop has received three key approvals for live store-to-door drone deliv­ery, includ­ing beyond visu­al line of sight oper­a­tions, deliv­ery over per­sons and prop­er­ty, and deploy­ment of the first rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing last-mile drone deliv­ery hub with the near­ly 10,000 poten­tial cus­tomers in New Zealand. This marks a major mile­stone for the com­pa­ny.

The Kongs­berg Geospa­tial IRIS Ground Con­trol Sta­tion tech­nol­o­gy is vehi­cle autopi­lot agnos­tic and enables mul­ti­ple drones and sen­sor feeds to be mon­i­tored and con­trolled simul­ta­ne­ous­ly by a sin­gle remote oper­a­tor and pro­vides real-time cal­cu­la­tion of air­craft sep­a­ra­tion to enable BVLOS oper­a­tions. Built on Kongs­berg Geospatial’s indus­try-lead­ing Ter­raLens SDK, IRIS Ter­mi­nal pro­vides advanced real-time 2D and 3D visu­al­i­sa­tion of all air­borne track and weath­er data, as well as cues, alerts, and warn­ings to enable a sin­gle oper­a­tor to mon­i­tor a com­plex air­space envi­ron­ment.

Matthew Swee­ny

Matthew Swee­ny, SkyDrop’s Founder and CEO, com­ment­ed, “We are excit­ed to work with the CAA to make New Zealand the inno­va­tion leader in speed­i­er, cheap­er and green­er last-mile drone deliv­ery. We’re very pleased to be work­ing with Kongs­berg Geospa­tial, the indus­try leader in pre­ci­sion real-time soft­ware for air traf­fic con­trol.”

Sky­Drop designs and builds its drones along with the enabling soft­ware, as well as launch­es plat­forms to pro­vide deliv­ery solu­tions to cus­tomers. The recent approval unlocks rev­enue-gen­er­at­ing deliv­er­ies for the com­pa­ny.

The CAA grant­ed the approval after con­duct­ing a thor­ough review of SkyDrop’s tech­nol­o­gy and oper­at­ing pro­ce­dures. Under­pin­ning this man­date is the company’s “indus­try-lead­ing safe­ty tech­nol­o­gy” includ­ing an onboard ‘Para­chute Recov­ery Sys­tem’.

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The approval fol­lows years of exten­sive tri­alling in the U.S and New Zealand. Sky­Drop has also received approvals from Waika­to Dis­trict Coun­cil fol­low­ing engage­ment with local stake­hold­ers in Raahui Pooke­ka (Hunt­ly) includ­ing the Waahi Paa, who named a Sky­Drop drone Te Kaahu (The Hawk). This drone deliv­ery enables speed­i­er and cheap­er deliv­ery for local com­mu­ni­ties as well as reduc­ing traf­fic con­ges­tion and green­house emis­sions.

This lays the foun­da­tion for Sky­Drop to scale as the risk assess­ment method that secured this approval can be adapt­ed to addi­tion­al loca­tions to build a nation­wide net­work of drone hubs across New Zealand, Aus­tralia, Cana­da and the Euro­pean Union mem­ber coun­tries who all use the JARUS SORA reg­u­la­to­ry guide­lines.

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