25km BVLOS Flight by Wingcopter Delivering Samples for Pharmaceutical Company Merck

On February 5th, 2020 an incredible 25km (15.5 mi) BVLOS flight took place in the densely populated area of Darmstadt, Germany. Or, as TechCrunch titled it: "German drone delivery trial paves the way to replacing trucks for inter-office deliveries".

German drone maker Wingcopter worked together with pharmaceutical company Merck KGaA Germany, the city of Darmstadt as well as the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences on this. The goal was to deliver pigment samples from one Merck site in the city if Gernsheim to another Merck site in the city of Darmstadt. Direct air distance between the two cities is 21km (13 mi), but due to airspace regulations their flight route was not direct. The air flight mission included to first flight more or less straight north and then turn east. As a result the Wingcopter drone flew around the city of Griesheim. Here is a map of that:

To visualize the rough route the drone flew, we've put together a quick screen shot from the German DFS Drone app that also shows no fly zones and other interesting information in terms of drone regulation.

The Wingcopter was carrying a hook-on-device from Germany's Droniq company that provided airspace safety. As a result the drone could be tracked in real-time through UTM. If you'd like to know more, head over to the Droniq website and watch the video about their technology.

Furthermore, the Sky Drone FPV 3 was used to provide real-time video from the Wingcopter drone down to the ground control station. At the same time, a real-time data connection can provide telemetry information as well as command & control to a ground control station like QGroundControl (read this blog post to learn how this can be achieved using Sky Drone FPV).

TechCrunch titled this flight:

"German drone delivery trial paves the way to replacing trucks for inter-office deliveries"

Here are some photos from the event (sources below for reference):

Sky Drone FPV 3 camera mounted at the landing gear.

Sky Drone desktop client stream in-flight video in real-time. Because the camera is mounted at the left landing gear, one can see the left rotor in the video.

Wingcopter with Sky Drone FPV 3 camera at landing gear, in front of a Merck building.

Closeup of Wingcopter in flight with Sky Drone FPV 3 mounted on it.

More information about our Sky Drone FPV 3 product and its capabilities can be found here: https://www.skydrone.aero/collections/frontpage/products/sky-drone-fpv-3

Sources:

• Tweet by @GangolfSchrimpf
• Tweet by @merck_de
• Tweet by @merckgroup
• Tweet by @Wingcopter
• Tweet by @TechCrunch