Pierce Aerospace Announces Partnership with Skye Air Mobility at CES, Bringing Remote ID to Commercial Drone Delivery in India

Skye Air Mobility brings drone delivery to India's healthcare, e-commerce, quick commerce and agri-commodity sectors to build the fastest, most sustainable, and most efficient network to transport everything and anything that a drone can fly. Skye Air is marking its monopoly in 10 states across India working with clients like Flipkart (Walmart Group), Dunzo, Swiggy, BlueDart DHL, Redcliffe Labs, Aster Healthcare, Cure Foods, Tata 1MG and many others. Skye Air has completed over 2300 BVLOS flights delivering over 1 million packages covering an aerial distance of 12800 km. The mission of the company is to enable faster, sustainable, cost-effective and efficient deliveries across verticals and bring in the rightful impact to reduce turn around time for its clients.

Skye Air has introduced its proprietary UTM platform, Skye UTM which is a cloud-based drone traffic management system that stitches unmanned air traffic with the manned aviation airspace. Skye UTM is India’s one and only drone traffic management platform that has been built towards providing better navigation, risk assessment, connectivity, and traffic management to all drone operators across the airspace. Skye UTM has supported over 300 successful BVLOS drone flights to date. The Skye UTM captures more than 255 parameters of drone movements and stores them into its ‘Blackbox’ which is a published systematic description of the entire flight. The platform offers the first 3-Dimensional view of the drone airspace along with operations and regulations mapping servers which offer the latest airspace status, verified paths, and display real time UAV movements.

"We're working with the Skye Air team on concepts that will work in India's rapidly growing drone market," said Aaron Pierce, CEO of Pierce Aerospace. "Our infrastructure approach to Remote ID aids Skye Air's growth and integrates their UTM with our Remote ID services that enhance the safety and security of their commercial operations."

“We are very proud to partner with Industry leading Remote ID service provider, Pierce Aerospace” said Ankit Kumar, CEO of Skye Air. “The partnership will bring together a combined solution of UTM & RID to the Indian and US market. Having completed more than 1 million package deliveries, we believe it’s the right time to introduce Pierce Aerospace’s Remote ID capabilities for enterprises and the government to manage traffic and have real-time UAS tracking through combined solutions. Skye Air is uniquely positioned both as a service provider and user for the combined (UTM + RID) offerings.”

"As an Indiana-based company, we are especially excited to continue the growth of Indiana and India's thriving trade and business relationship," said Pierce. "In the fall of 2022, the Indiana Economic Development Corporation and the Indiana India Business Council presented us with an opportunity to meet with Ambassador Taranjit Singh Sandhu. This led to follow-on meetings with the Indian Ministry of Commerce, where we discussed important international business opportunities and the growth potential of the Indian drone economy. Through this new market entry, we believe there's a great opportunity for our respective drone businesses and the local communities this international partnership will serve."

"Pierce Aerospace and Skye Air Mobility working together to bring a comprehensive drone solution to the Indian commercial market is the exact sort of natural partnership that the Indiana India Business Council is proud to help foster," said Dr. Aarti Shah, Chairwoman Indiana India Business Council. “This is an exciting time for combining the strengths and global leadership positions of India and Indiana’s startups. India and Indiana have a long history of successful trade with companies like Infosys establishing their North American headquarters in Indiana. The Pierce Aerospace and Skye Air Mobility partnership further builds that legacy of successful trade and the trust not only between Indiana and India, but in the trust, innovative leadership, and friendship of the United States and India.” 

Pierce Aerospace and Skye Air aim to utilize the companies’ respective technologies in both hardware and software to expand commercial drone delivery opportunities. By adopting Pierce Aerospace's leading Remote ID solutions, Skye Air satisfies aviation regulatory, safety, and security considerations. The future inclusion of Flight Portal ID's commercial Remote ID data feeds allows Skye Air to correlate and positively identify UAS in its proprietary Skye UTM system. At the same time, those data feeds can provide critical situational awareness to Indian government regulators and security organizations.

Ankit Kumar, CEO of Skye Air, further added “After having completed over 1 million package deliveries in India, we are scaling the drone delivery model in multiple parts of India. With Pierce Aerospace’s Remote ID systems, we shall be making the flights more trackable and safer. The solution will also build confidence in regulators and ANSPs towards having situational awareness of the UAS activities and segregate between approved and rogue drones so as to deploy necessary security measures.”

Flight Portal ID, Pierce Aerospace's UAS Remote ID technology suite, consists of Remote ID receivers, broadcast modules, software, integration capabilities, and remote administration services. Flight Portal ID offers market-leading Remote ID solutions and has an integration service record with over a dozen commercial unmanned traffic management (UTM), detect and avoid (DAA), and United States Department of Defense command and control (C2) and C-UAS systems. Commercial and government solutions are available for integration with Counter-UAS, UAS OEMs, and UTM systems.