Asteria Aerospace is the first company in India to receive drone insurance for beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations continuing to push India forward within the commercial drone space. The insurance was given by the state-owned General insurance company.
The drone insurance was specifically designed for Asteria Aerospace and was approved by the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). The company can now undertake its BLVOS drone test flights with drone insurance covering the 100 flight hours of testing to come.
The Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has already approved 20 companies to undertake BVLOS drone trials with Asteria Aerospace being one of them. The drone flights will be done in a sandbox environment with plans for them to take place about two hours outside of Bengaluru. The tests will go through various use cases including, aerial survey of pipelines, railways, and roadways.
The outcome of the test flights will be written up in a report and delivered to the DGCA who will use the data collected to draft policies and regulations around beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) drone flights throughout India.
Neel Mehta, co-founder of Asteria Aerospace said:
“Asteria is proud to lead the way for BVLOS drone operations in India, and we are glad to have the support of TropoGo and National Insurance in this journey. This is an exciting time for the drone industry in India and BVLOS flight operations will unlock many critical as well as emerging use cases for drones.”
Shubhankar Pain, Chief Regional Manager of National Insurance followed with:
“We have been seeing increasing Drone adoption in the last few months, be it COVID Control, AMPHAN Disaster Management or Locusts Control. We can also see “Beyond Visual Line of Sight” operations will further accelerate the innovation especially for Medicine delivery and in Agriculture in the coming years. When we have been approached with the Insurance request for the Asteria Aerospace consortium, DunzoAir Consortium we were very happy with their depth of knowledge on drone operations risks and decided to extend our support to the dynamic Indian Drone Community. We will keep on monitoring the space and will continue to extend our support to the vibrant start-up fraternity for Insurtech Innovations.”
Photo: Asteria Aerospace
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