Navifly: Drone-UAS Traffic Management (UTM), Building Digital Regulatory Frameworks Into The Drone Airspace
Aviation is no more from port to port. It’s warehouse to warehouse or shop to customer. Navifly creates and governs this modern airspace by laying down digital regulatory frameworks across the drone airspace, catalysing urban air mobility’ says Yashodhan Naik, CEO, Navifly. Navifly provides Drone/UAS Traffic Management (UTM) as a service through its platform: The NaviATC. The platform is key to India’s adoption of drone technology within it’s various industries. The platform converts all paper based regulations to digital regulations and applies them to the vast sets of operators across the airspace.Drones are being used in various industries from warehouse sorting, infrastructure checking, doorstep delivery to photography and are providing tremendous value to the industries by decreasing their operational costs and boosting efficiencies. A number of companies are adopting drones to their operations, awaiting certification from the regulators to test, certify and apply drones to their fleets. Giants such as Swiggy, Dunzo, Amazon are in the process of awaiting adoption. Redwing technologies is another Indian drone delivery startup offer mini-cargo drones to deliver essential cargo such as COVID vaccinations during the pandemic. Yet, flying drones over the city airspace is no easy feat. The complications of the urban airspace are highly dynamic and uncertain, thus causing massive delays towards testing and certification to these services. But there is a ray of hope: NaviATC.
UTM’s are the most important piece puzzle which is Urban air Mobility. The NaviATC platform is built to counter-act and solve the issues faced by operators. NaviATC is a cloud-based solution offering dynamic airspace management, involvement of several stakeholders, active risk assessment to ensure safety at every step of the operation, flight information management and exchange systems to communicate with legacy systems of general aviation. The platform is built with the vision of an integrated airspace, meaning that the platform handles individuals, fleet operator’s, commercial, non-commercial operators and further integrates the drone airspace with general aviation airspace.
The platform offers the drone operators hyper localized services catered to their specific operations to support safe, efficient, and sustainable adoption and operation of their drone.
The services accommodate the most efficient methods for operators to access the airspace and create profitable models to reach their customers. NaviATC enables high density drone operations, allowing multiple operator fleets to simultaneously operate while the platform actively de-conflicts the airspace, ensuring security to all operations over the urban landscape.
The platform gathers the ability to secure the airspace by risk-assessment algorithms which aggregate airspace/operational data from multiple sources and predict a specific operation’s success before the operation has even begun. This prediction will determine if the operation has approval. The time to approval is cut down by 95% by the platform, saving operator their valuable time. The platform pushes operators, manufacturers, service providers to adopt mitigation methods and prove their robustness to ensure better prediction and time to approval of their mission submissions.
‘Our operator services are dominantly focused towards enabling a high volume of organizations and fleet operators to operate across the urban landscape. This induces growth of the drone industry at an exponential level,’ says Yashodhan. NaviFly stands ahead of its competitors by offering premium, high-value-added services to its operators that include hyper-localized regulations, fast tracking approvals and security to assets.
The company is participating in Sandbox environments in Ireland, India & Canada with operators to validate procedures, test and certify the platform, bringing aviation to everyone’s doorstep. Navifly is imagining logistical corridors within these countries and will make it a reality by 2023. ‘This is the decade of Urban Air Mobility and Navifly’ says Yashodhan.
The platform gathers the ability to secure the airspace by risk-assessment algorithms which aggregate airspace/operational data from multiple sources and predict a specific operation’s success before the operation has even begun. This prediction will determine if the operation has approval. The time to approval is cut down by 95% by the platform, saving operator their valuable time. The platform pushes operators, manufacturers, service providers to adopt mitigation methods and prove their robustness to ensure better prediction and time to approval of their mission submissions.
The reason UTM is crucial today, is the gap between the Regulators and the Drone operators leading to mistrust slow pace in development of the industry. This gap is filled by Navifly, the platform allows instant, real-time communications, and exchange of data between the two stakeholders. The Digital Sky platform is the regulatory body governing UTM’s and operators within the borders of India. It is digital version of DGCA (DGCA 2.0) equipped with digitization and automation of paper-based processes to move towards this new mode of aviation.NaviFly extrapolates the regulations set by DGCA 2.0 to the airspace aboveand creating a drone-friendly environment in the Indian Skies.
Naviatc is a cloud-based solution offering dynamic airspace management, involvement of several stakeholders, active risk assessment to ensure safety at every step of the operation
‘Our operator services are dominantly focused towards enabling a high volume of organizations and fleet operators to operate across the urban landscape. This induces growth of the drone industry at an exponential level,’ says Yashodhan. NaviFly stands ahead of its competitors by offering premium, high-value-added services to its operators that include hyper-localized regulations, fast tracking approvals and security to assets.
The company is participating in Sandbox environments in Ireland, India & Canada with operators to validate procedures, test and certify the platform, bringing aviation to everyone’s doorstep. Navifly is imagining logistical corridors within these countries and will make it a reality by 2023. ‘This is the decade of Urban Air Mobility and Navifly’ says Yashodhan.
