Airobotics Receives CASA’s 1st Approval for BVLOS Drone Flights

Drone startup Airobotics today announced that it has recently made Australian aviation history by obtaining the nation’s first and only Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA) approval to operate automated multi-rotor drones from its Remote Operations Center (ROC) beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) with no aircrew needed at the client site.

Alternatively, Remote Pilots are located within Airobotics Australia’s ROC, at a designated Remote Pilot Station (RPS), operating more than 1,000 km away from onsite systems at the customer sites. This new “man on the loop” level of operations enables human operators to supervise flights, but without requiring “man in the loop” pilots to intervene in flight operations.

Niv Russo, Airobotics’ Vice President of Aviation and Compliance stated: “This landmark approval is a major achievement for Airobotics and its future growth across Australia. Removing aircrews from potentially dangerous environments, like mines, enables customers to extract maximum value and reduce risk from their business operations by leveraging technology and automation. This progression marks the next step for Airobotics as we continue to break new ground in unmanned drone technology to deliver safer and more accurate, data-driven solutions.”

“The ROC approval sets a new benchmark for unmanned drone operations for the Asia-Pacific region, and given the technical complexity that has been overcome, is a real testament to our in-country capability,” said Joe Urli, Airobotics’ Director of Flight Operations and Chief Remote Pilot. “Airobotics’ unmanned drone platform significantly benefits our clients, providing them with operations that increase efficiency whilst saving operational costs and empowering flight crews to operate in secure locations hundreds of miles away from hazardous sites.”

Urli added, “We’d like to extend our utmost gratitude and appreciation to the CASA RPAS team members who worked collaboratively with Airobotics over many months in achieving this first-of-its-kind approval. This milestone is a credit to our dedication and constant desire to improve the processes that have made Airobotics the region’s leading unmanned aviation company.”

Airobotics’ automated solution represents the next generation of drone operations, overtaking standard piloted services which can be prohibitive, imprecise and not always available. The company is the first and only drone solution worldwide permitted to fly without a human operator (certification from Civil Aviation Authority of Israel, March 2017, and certification from the US Federal Aviation Administration, December 2018, see here and here for more details). This positions Airobotics as the only drone company certified to fly BVLOS in the US, Australia and Israel, three countries considered to be in the cutting edge of UAV regulations.

Airobotics has developed a pilotless drone solution, the first of its kind in the global market. Airobotics provides an end-to-end, fully automatic solution for collecting aerial data and gaining invaluable insights. The industrial grade platform is available on-site and on-demand, enabling industrial facilities to access premium aerial data in a faster, safer, more efficient way.

The team at Airobotics fuses expertise in aerospace hardware design, robust electronic systems, leading software engineering, and years of experience in commercial drone operations. This varied experience has allowed them to design a solution suited to address the needs of the world’s most complex industrial environments.