Skyports Drone Services acquires Redbird Aero, marking its official entry into Australian market

Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices has acquired Red­bird Aero, Australia’s lead­ing large car­go drone oper­a­tor.

The acqui­si­tion marks a sig­nif­i­cant mile­stone for both com­pa­nies, sig­ni­fy­ing Sky­ports’ offi­cial entry into the Aus­tralian mar­ket and advanc­ing uncrewed avi­a­tion in Aus­tralia, build­ing on Red­bird Aero’s strong foun­da­tion. The esti­mat­ed cost of the acqui­si­tion has­n’t been dis­closed.

Alex Brown, Direc­tor of Drone Ser­vices, Sky­ports, com­ment­ed: “As an Aus­tralian I’m incred­i­bly excit­ed to be expand­ing into the Aus­tralian mar­ket. The poten­tial for drone deliv­ery and inspec­tion ser­vices in Aus­tralia is huge due to its unique geog­ra­phy. We’ll be bring­ing our proven deliv­ery and inspec­tion ser­vices and exist­ing cus­tomer part­ner­ships to Aus­tralia.

“Thanks to the great base­line built by Scott and Red­bird Aero we hope to expand rapid­ly into the mar­ket, with our first flights start­ing with­in weeks.”

With this expan­sion into Aus­tralia, Sky­ports is set to apply its exper­tise in Remote­ly Pilot­ed Air­craft Sys­tems (RPAS) to improve health­care access and strength­en sup­ply chain resilience across rur­al and remote regions.

More­over, it will expand its auto­mat­ed drone inspec­tion ser­vices that sim­pli­fy dif­fi­cult, time-con­sum­ing and dan­ger­ous jobs, such as lin­ear asset inspec­tion, water­way mon­i­tor­ing and real-time sur­veil­lance.

Since its incep­tion, Red­bird Aero has been ded­i­cat­ed to improv­ing health­care access and deliv­er­ing life-sav­ing ser­vices to rur­al, remote, and Indige­nous com­mu­ni­ties.

A key part of this effort has been focus­ing on bring­ing large car­go RPAS (>150 kgs) to Aus­tralian skies through reg­u­la­to­ry devel­op­ment, oper­a­tional inno­va­tion, and strate­gic part­ner­ships.

By work­ing close­ly with avi­a­tion reg­u­la­tors, gov­ern­ment agen­cies, and health­care providers, the drone oper­a­tor has been at the fore­front of enabling safe, scal­able, and sus­tain­able drone logis­tics that can sup­port Australia’s most chal­leng­ing envi­ron­ments.

Scott Wheel­er, Founder and for­mer CEO of Red­bird Aero, joins Sky­ports as Head of APAC, Drone Ser­vices as part of the acqui­si­tion.

He added: “I’m thrilled to wel­come Sky­ports to the Aus­tralian RPAS mar­ket. Sky­ports’ exten­sive expe­ri­ence and atti­tude to safe­ty make it the ide­al part­ner to ful­fil Red­bird Aero’s mis­sion in help­ing, serv­ing and pro­tect­ing peo­ple in region­al and remote parts of Aus­tralia.”

Sky­ports expan­sion con­tin­ues on the back of ACS Group’s Series C invest­ment into Sky­ports last year.

ACS Group has a strong Aus­tralian pres­ence through sub­sidiaries CIMIC, CPB Con­trac­tors, Sedg­man, Pacif­ic Part­ner­ships, Leighton Asia and Thiess.

Sky­ports is already work­ing with sev­er­al of these ACS Group com­pa­nies to launch con­struc­tion mon­i­tor­ing and asset inspec­tion drone ser­vices, with first flights sched­uled to com­mence in June 2025.