Telangana: The Minister of the Civil Aviation Union, Jyotiraditya Scindia, launched “Medicines from the Sky”, which uses drones to deliver drugs to primary care centres. Pilots will use drones to test the delivery of drugs on the Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) 500 meters away. This is the country’s first project to use drones for BVLOS operations.
The first sortie was conducted by a drone built by SkyAir Mobility for the Blue Dart Express, Consortium partner. The first drone delivered a box of five kilograms of vaccine within ten minutes to a community health centre three kilometres away. Telangana IT Minister KT Rama Rao said that life-saving medicines, vaccines and blood can be easily delivered to locations, eliminating traffic and other obstacles. The “Medicines from the sky” is an initiative of the Government of Telangana guided by the wing of the emerging technologies of the Telangana IT’s department in collaboration with the Global Economic Forum, Niti Aayog and HealthNet Global (Apollo Hospitals).
Three of the eight selected consortia – Bluedart Med Express Consortium (with Skye Air Mobility), Helicopter Consortium (Marut Drones) and CurisFly Consortium (TechEagle Innovations) – started test flights on Saturday. Pilots would test the durability of their drones at greater distances and heavier payloads to determine their reliability.
