HYDERABAD: With the ‘Medicine from the Sky’ initiative of Telangana receiving a final Specific Assurance and Integrity Levels (SAIL) score of ‘II’ on a scale of ‘VI’ — indicating low-risk — a major milestone has been crossed in the State’s endeavour to experiment delivery of vaccines using the identified airspace of Vikarabad Beyond Visual Line of sight (BVLOS).
The Hazardous Identification and Risk Mitigation (HIRM) workshop held on Friday with all stakeholders including MoCA, DGCA, AAI, BCAS and Vikarabad district administration has explored the potential hazards and mitigation strategies during the upcoming trials by discussing the Concept of Operations (CONOPS) and Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) 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 crew and officials to ensure smooth conduct of trials. The first phase of flights with select consortia is tentatively expected to begin in the last week of June.
In his opening remarks, Jayesh Ranjan, Principal Secretary (Information Technology) said that the objective of the ‘Medicine from the Sky’ project was to generate insights that could drive future adoption strategies and policy interventions for inclusion of drones in the healthcare supply-chain. “Eventually, the goal is to integrate drone deliveries with existing systems and enable urban grade infrastructure even for remote and rural areas,” he stated.