Volansi wins Airmanship Special Award at Lake Kivu Challenge in Africa

Autonomous VTOL man­u­fac­tur­er Volan­si has won the Air­man­ship Spe­cial Award from the African Drone Forum, for its ‘out­stand­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion and oper­a­tional excel­lence’ at this year’s Lake Kivu Chal­lenge in Africa.

The chal­lenge was part of the 2020 African Drone Forum held in Rwan­da in Feb­ru­ary, which saw a col­lab­o­ra­tion between the Gov­ern­ment of Rwan­da, the Unit­ed Kingdom’s Depart­ment for Inter­na­tion­al Devel­op­ment (DFID/UKAID), and the World Bank Group.

The Forum and Chal­lenge aimed to show­case real-world use cas­es for autonomous drone deliv­ery across Africa, and received more than 70 appli­ca­tions from drone com­pa­nies head­quar­tered in 35 coun­tries. The top ten final­ists were then invit­ed to put their drones and oper­a­tors to the test through real-life sce­nar­ios at Lake Kivu.

Volan­si CEO and Co-Founder, Han­nan Parviz­ian, said: “We are hon­oured to receive the Air­man­ship Award from the African Drone Forum organ­is­ers and see it as anoth­er val­i­da­tion of our abil­i­ty to con­tin­ue to trans­form the way crit­i­cal goods are trans­port­ed to the places they are need­ed most.

“We see air­man­ship as a mul­ti-dimen­sion­al con­cept and a mind­set that every mem­ber of our team strives to embody every day.”

As part of the fly­ing com­pe­ti­tion, par­tic­i­pants under­went rig­or­ous scru­ti­neer­ing of their safe­ty prac­tices, train­ing stan­dards, main­te­nance pro­ce­dures, risk mit­i­ga­tion, and con­cepts of oper­a­tion.

Volan­si says its UAVs are unique­ly suit­ed to the com­pli­cat­ed ter­rain of Africa due to the hybrid flight sys­tem employed in their design that com­bines elec­tric ver­ti­cal take­off and land­ing (eVTOL) with a fixed-wing, “pusher”-driven for­ward flight mode.

This enables the drones to com­plete com­plex, two-way mis­sions with min­i­mal to zero infra­struc­ture needs. Because the drones ful­ly land at the deliv­ery point, they can deliv­er and return car­go such as sam­ples for analy­sis and diag­no­sis, or parts for repair.

Mike Jack­son, Direc­tor of Flight Oper­a­tions at Volan­si and recent­ly retired US Air Force Spe­cial Oper­a­tions Colonel, said: “Our team was able to lever­age the expe­ri­ence we have from our on-going, oper­a­tional projects already occur­ring in Africa and else­where.

“That abil­i­ty to scale over and over is our dif­fer­en­tia­tor. We have oper­a­tional stan­dards and pro­ce­dures already in place, which is impor­tant for dis­ci­plined and pro­fes­sion­al avi­a­tion oper­a­tions- espe­cial­ly ones that rely on auto­mat­ed flight.”

Volan­si added that it will look to con­tin­ue com­mer­cial and human­i­tar­i­an projects in Africa, with the long-term vision of col­lab­o­rat­ing with local gov­ern­ments and com­mu­ni­ties to build the first inter­con­nect­ed deliv­ery drone net­work with­in the con­ti­nent.