Skyports Drone Services, RWE and Skyways complete Germany’s first long-range drone deliveries to offshore wind turbines

 Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices (Sky­ports), the glob­al leader in drone-enabled deliv­ery and inspec­tion, RWE, a world leader in off­shore wind, and Sky­ways, a design­er and man­u­fac­tur­er of long-range autonomous unmanned car­go air­craft sys­tems, have suc­cess­ful­ly con­duct­ed Germany’s first long range off­shore drone deliv­ery tri­al to wind tur­bines at Arkona Wind­farm, oper­at­ed by RWE.

Tak­ing place as part of a three-week flight demon­stra­tion, the drone flights were designed to prove the ben­e­fits of inte­grat­ing long range deliv­er­ies into the off­shore logis­tics sup­ply chain.

With light car­go deliv­er­ies to the tur­bines usu­al­ly rely­ing on a boat jour­ney which would take at least an hour, the drones pro­vid­ed a sub-30 minute flight which could be booked on demand, demon­strat­ing a more flex­i­ble, effi­cient and sus­tain­able alter­na­tive for deliv­er­ing small, time crit­i­cal parts.

Alex Brown, CEO, Sky­ports Drone Ser­vices, said: “Drones are a pow­er­ful tool when it comes to oper­at­ing in remote loca­tions and harsh envi­ron­ments – and off­shore wind tur­bines are a per­fect use case.

“With their advan­tages of speed, cost, safe­ty and improved sus­tain­abil­i­ty, they’re becom­ing a very attrac­tive option for infra­struc­ture oper­a­tors. This tri­al proves their capa­bil­i­ties, and we’re look­ing for­ward to con­tin­ue push­ing what’s pos­si­ble with our drones for RWE.”

Build­ing on pre­vi­ous flight tri­als con­duct­ed last year, which saw RWE and Sky­ports con­duct­ing Beyond Visu­al Line of Sight (BVLOS) flight deliv­er­ies to off­shore sub­sta­tions, this next phase saw Sky­ports and RWE part­ner­ing with lead­ing drone man­u­fac­tur­er Sky­ways, deploy­ing its V2 drone.

A dual hybrid air­craft, the V2 has elec­tric motors han­dling ver­ti­cal take-off and land­ing, and a heavy fuel engine pow­er­ing long range cruise, giv­ing the air­craft a max­i­mum range of up to 770kms.

Tak­ing off from RWE’s oper­a­tion and main­te­nance base in Mukran Port on the Ger­man island of Rügen, the drone flew an auto­mat­ed route of over 40kms out to the Arkona Wind farm, with up to 10kg of car­go.

Once at the wind farm, it approached a tar­get wind tur­bine, locked on to the tur­bine nacelle and per­formed an auto­mat­ed car­go drop. With the car­go drop com­plete, the drone then auto­mat­i­cal­ly flew the return leg back to Mukran Port and its orig­i­nal take­off point, super­vised by Sky­ports’ pilots.

Vivek Trive­di, O&M Opti­mi­sa­tion Man­ag­er, RWE, said: “The tri­al has proved that drones give us flex­i­bil­i­ty. In off­shore, flex­i­bil­i­ty is pow­er. They allow us to react faster, reduce wait­ing times, and opti­mise resources. It’s a whole new dimen­sion of effi­cien­cy. Long term, we see that drone oper­a­tions could become part of a hybrid logis­tics mod­el for oper­at­ing and main­tain­ing our off­shore wind fleet.”

Over the course of the tri­al, the Sky­ways air­craft flew over 2,500kms and clocked up over 65 hours of flight time. Tak­ing place as a part of an ongo­ing series of tri­als by RWE, the project looked to val­i­date the ben­e­fits of drones for off­shore logis­tics.

Longer term, RWE has an ambi­tion to include drones with­in a hybrid sup­ply chain along­side crew trans­fer ves­sels, which it sees as hav­ing game chang­ing poten­tial once full inte­gra­tion is achieved. 

Charles Ack­nin, CEO, Sky­ways, added: “It’s excit­ing to watch our com­mer­cial cus­tomers push the lim­its, fly­ing in remote, hard-to-reach areas with demand­ing weath­er con­di­tions. Stand­ing up BVLOS oper­a­tions is no small feat, and we’re proud that Sky­ways is the air­craft of choice for those mis­sions.”

With­in the project, Sky­ports pro­vid­ed the full end-to-end ser­vice for drone oper­a­tions, han­dling reg­u­la­to­ry approvals, mis­sion plan­ning, pilot­ing the drones and deliv­er­ing final project assess­ment and report­ing.

Sky­ports brings with it exten­sive expe­ri­ence in oper­at­ing long-range drones in harsh envi­ron­ments, hav­ing flown parts to off­shore oil rigs in Nor­way, and con­duct­ed thou­sands of shore-to-ship deliv­er­ies around the world.