Tannuka Juneja
Drone delivery company Skye Air Mobility has partnered with Flipkart Health, the pharmaceutical business arm of e-commerce platform Flipkart Internet Pvt. to deliver medicines by drone, said a statement from the companies.
The deal was implemented with the launch of “Beyond Visual Line of Sight” flights from Flipkart Health Warehouse in West Bengal to various locations in Kolkata and the suburbs, according to the statement on Tuesday.
The initiative will have 20 daily flights, each with up to five kilograms of medicines, which will be transported from warehouses to 10 points throughout the area, according to the statement. The maximum air distance covered by the UDAN will be 16 km (24 km by road). The statement states that the trial will continue until September 8, 2022.
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He described the service as real-time delivery that provides optimal flight safety and temperature monitoring. According to the statement, Flipkart will develop a cross-city and cross-district health model to deliver medicine to remote areas.
“…We are extremely proud on our collaboration with Flipkart Health to enable faster delivery of medicines to the citizens of West Bengal. Drones are faster, sustainable, more accessible, cost-effective to operate and capable of doing multiple deliveries in a day,” the statement said quoting Ankit Kumar, CEO of Skye Air Mobility.
With the ongoing ‘beyond visual line of sight’ trials, we anticipate gathering more data on the route, flight and cost-economic viability in order to develop models for commercial flights to begin in the next few months, Kumar said in the statement.
While COVID has seen an increase in drone delivery pilots and collaborations, the government accepted this new reality earlier this month when it said it would not obstruct such testing. In the last year, Skye Air has launched similar pilots with Swiggy and Curefoods, and on August 15, Redwing Aerospace announced a medical delivery pilot in Arunachal Pradesh. Redwing will transport prescription drugs and diagnostic test samples to and from the far-flung town of Seppa, which is often rather challenging to get to.
