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DGCA has permitted at least 10 entities to pilot remote drone surveillance, delivery

At least 10 consortia, including Reliance-backed Asteria Aerospace, Nandan Nilekani-backed ShopX, Spicejet, and Google-backed Dunzo, among others have been permitted by civil aviation regulator, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, to carry out “beyond visual line of sight” (BVLOS) drone projects in designated airspaces across the country. This is being done under an effort by the DGCA to formulate regulations around commercial BVLOS drone operations, and the regulator is looking at these projects to gain insights into such operations.

BVLOS drone operations allow for piloting a drone remotely, without having to be manoeuvred by looking at it: a crucial use case, according to multiple people from the industry.

Permitted consortia: As part of this project, the DGCA had shortlisted 13 consortia by April 2020, and had told them that they will start receiving permission letters from the regulator soon. It had received proposals from about 34 consortia in total. While consortia of Throttle Aerospace Systems and Dunzo had received their permission letters in early March, the process halted for a while owing to the COVID19 related lockdown in India, and the remaining consortia started receiving their permission letters in the last week of May.

Apart from Dunzo and Throttle Aerospace, the other consortia that have received DGCA’s permission are: Saubika Consortium, Asteria Aerospace, ShopXOmnipresent Consortium, ANRA Consortia A and B, Spicejet, Dhaksha Unmanned Systems, and ClearSky Flight Consortium. Another consortium called Sagar Defence Engineering, which was shortlisted in April, is yet to receive DGCA’s permission to start the project, the company’s cofounder confirmed to MediaNama.

Some consortia such as ShopXOmnipresent, and ANRA are planning to test delivery using drones, while some such as Saubika are looking to test surveillance for military purposes, disasters, inspections, and payload deliveries. Spicejet, meanwhile is looking test transport of cargo goods, and Asteria will experiment surveying long pipelines at crude oil refineries. The consortia participating in this project are exempt from current drone regulations, in that, apart from flying drones beyond the visual line of sight, they don’t require the no permission no take off (NPNT) clearance before each flight, or unique identification numbers (UIN). While the DGCA has relaxed most restrictions for this project, the drones that can fly as part of this still need to have a Drone Acknowledgement Number (DAN), an identifier issued by the Civil Aviation Ministry to civilian drones.

Since current drone regulations don’t allow BVLOS operations, this exercise is essentially a regulatory sandbox — an expression of interest for which was floated in May 2019 — being offered to the shortlisted consortia. The aim, as the DGCA said in the May 2019 EoI, is to create “evidence-based regulatory requirements to enable commercial BVLOS operations in the near future”. Consortia that have been offered the sandbox have to submit a proof of concept by September 2020 to a committee called BVLOS Experiment Assessment and Monitoring (BEAM), being headed by Airport Authority of India’s joint general manager, Dilip Kumar Damodaran. The committee has members from DGCA, AAI, and the Civil Aviation Ministry.

Source: https://www.medianama.com


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