Telangana gets DGCA nod to operate vaccine delivery drones farther

HYDERABAD: A week after Telangana received permission to operate drones within the visual line of sight (VLOS) range for a period of one year, it has also been granted permission to operate drone flights ‘Beyond Visual Line of Sight’ (BVLOS) for its ‘Medicine from the Sky’ project for vaccine delivery in the Vikarabad district.
As per the state government, the approval for BVLOS, in addition to VLOS, by the director general of civil aviation was critical to explore the feasibility of the intended last mile coverage.
“This is because the medical centres at remote locations are typically far beyond the VLOS range of the vaccine and medical distribution hubs. The BVLOS clearance is a major step towards thoroughly testing these drones over long distances and thus gathering information on their reliability,” said a communique issued by the Telangana government.

The `Medicine from the Sky’ project was launched in late 2019 in partnership with the World Economic Forum (WEF). The EoI, that was released during Wings 2020 to invite participants for this study, received 16 applications, of which seven were selected to undertake flights in Vikarabad district as part of this project.
As per the state government, the drone operations are expected to commence in the fourth week of May or early June, subject to all clearances by MHA.
The drone flights would be conducted for 24 days, where four batches of drones would perform sorties for six days each.
The payload would consist of vaccine cold storage boxes equipped with temperature sensors and data loggers to record the performance.
In each batch, the first two days would have VLOS flights, followed by BVLOS flights over different distances over the remaining days.
Commenting on the development, Telangana IT & industries principal secretary Jayesh Ranjan said, “The success of these trials would establish the use case and pave the way for adopting the drones at scale and leveraging them for the healthcare supply chain.”