Wingcopter reveals world’s first triple-drop delivery drone, the Wingcopter 198

Wing­copter has intro­duced its lat­est eVTOL fixed-wing drone with the world’s first triple-drop mech­a­nism, as the first 100 orders are being made avail­able to reserve.

Based on its patent­ed tilt-rotor tech­nol­o­gy, the Wing­copter 198 can car­ry pay­loads of 6kg (13 pounds) on one bat­tery charge over 75km (47 miles). With less pay­load the dis­tance is increased to up to 110km (68 miles). The aircraft’s top speed is 150 km/h (93 mph).

Addi­tion­al­ly, the triple-drop mech­a­nism allows for sep­a­rate and pre­cise winch-deliv­ery of up to three pack­ages to mul­ti­ple des­ti­na­tions per flight. The Wing­copter 198 can also deliv­er two medi­um-sized pack­ages or one large pack­age pro­vid­ing max­i­mum flex­i­bil­i­ty in size and shape. The entire deliv­ery process is ful­ly auto­mat­ic.

A sin­gle oper­a­tor can con­trol a fleet of up to 10 Wing­copter 198s simul­ta­ne­ous­ly any­where in the world via new con­trol sta­tion soft­ware. And with advanced main­te­nance tech­nol­o­gy, it can avoid unplanned down­times, improve parts reli­a­bil­i­ty and low­er main­te­nance costs. 

Tom Plüm­mer, CEO of Wing­copter, said: “The Wing­copter 198 is a game-chang­er for drone-based deliv­er­ies, ready to cre­ate logis­ti­cal high­ways in the sky. It can be per­fect­ly uti­lized as a fleet solu­tion in deliv­ery net­works to cre­ate new oppor­tu­ni­ties, every­where.”

The Wing­copter 198 is a deliv­ery drone designed and devel­oped accord­ing to avi­a­tion safe­ty stan­dards and cur­rent­ly under­go­ing FAA type cer­ti­fi­ca­tion in the USA.

Thanks to the redun­dant sys­tem archi­tec­ture which includes eight instead of four motors, the Wing­copter 198 pro­vides an extreme­ly high degree of reli­a­bil­i­ty and safe­ty. All oth­er essen­tial com­po­nents such as the flight con­troller, air­speed sen­sor or bat­tery are also redun­dant­ly inte­grat­ed. The main com­mu­ni­ca­tion link to the oper­a­tor is LTE/5G, backed up by satel­lite.

Its soft­ware and inter­face design were devel­oped with a clear focus on mak­ing the user’s work­flow as sim­ple and effi­cient as pos­si­ble. It allows for ful­ly autonomous BVLOS flights and auto­mat­ed deliv­er­ies, while the smart bat­ter­ies can be swapped with­in sec­onds.

The Wing­copter Cloud also allows for mis­sion plan­ning to be inde­pen­dent of the oper­a­tion by using dif­fer­ent con­trol sta­tions. APIs enable a seam­less inte­gra­tion of fleet infor­ma­tion into cus­tomer soft­ware solu­tions.

Jonathan Hes­sel­barth, CTO of Wing­copter, added: “We applied the many years of expe­ri­ence with the Wing­copter 178, the mod­el that lit­er­al­ly enabled us to take off as a com­pa­ny, and applied it to the devel­op­ment of the Wing­copter 198, opti­mis­ing every design aspect for ease of use, effi­cien­cy and safe­ty. The result is what we believe to be the most advanced, ver­sa­tile and effi­cient deliv­ery drone solu­tion in its cat­e­go­ry.”

Wing­copter has also set up an Autho­rized Part­ner Pro­gramme to qual­i­fy, cer­ti­fy and enable part­ners such as drone-as-a-ser­vice providers, dis­trib­u­tors and deal­ers to oper­ate, pro­mote, dis­trib­ute and sup­port Wing­copter tech­nol­o­gy world­wide.

Any com­pa­nies inter­est­ed in reserv­ing a Wing­copter 198 can do so by click­ing here.