‘Medicine from the Sky’ set to take off in Telangana

As part of the project, BVLOS drone flights will be used for delivery of vaccines using the identified airspace in Vikarabad.

Hyderabad: Telangana government’s ‘Medicine from the Sky’ to deliver vaccines using Beyond Visual Line of Sight (BVLOS) drone flights in Vikarabad on experimental basis, is expected to begin in the last week of this month.

As part of the project, BVLOS drone flights will be used for delivery of vaccines using the identified airspace in Vikarabad. To ensure the operations are conducted safely and securely, a virtual ‘Hazard Identification and Risk Mitigation’ workshop was held on Saturday. All the stakeholders from MoCA, DGCA, AAI, BCAS, NITI Aayog and Vikarabad District Collectorate officials participated in the workshop.

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Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary, IT, in his opening remarks said the objective of ‘Medicine from the Sky’ was to generate insights that can drive future adoption strategies and policy interventions for inclusion of drones in healthcare supply chain. “The eventual goal is to integrate drone deliveries with existing systems and enable urban grade infrastructure even for remote and rural areas” he said. This was followed by presentations by representatives from the eight participating consortia (drone technology partners).

The proceedings of the HIRM workshop shall be included as part of the Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs) of all the drone technology partners for approval from the DGCA. The workshop also explored potential hazards and mitigation strategies during the upcoming trials by discussing the CONOPS (Concept of Operations) and SORA (Specific Operations Risk Assessment) of the flights in the Vikarabad airspace.

The CONOPS included detailed description of operations, various system checks, communication protocols, daily flight planning, roles and responsibilities of both crew and officials to ensure smooth conduct of the trials.
Further, the SORA methodology of Joint Authorities for Rule-making on Unmanned Systems (JARUS), group of experts from 63 countries incl. India, was followed to quantify both the ground and air risk.

A final Specific Assurance and Integrity Levels (SAIL) score of ‘II’ was calculated on combining the quantified risks and accounting for strategic and tactical mitigations. A SAIL score of ‘II’ on a scale of ‘VI’ indicates low risk.

Also read:

Drones by Airserve to deliver medicines, vaccines to PHCs in Vikarabad from June 22

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