Recap: Amsterdam Drone Week

Launching the Avy Aera drone

Last week was exciting for the drone industry - Amsterdam Drone week! If you weren’t able to attend, no need to worry we’ve summed it all up for you. 3 days full of drones, demos, and discussions: the perfect opportunity to get to know the other players in the field and to share knowledge on current air solutions, potential innovations and critical regulations. 

We shared our booth with KPN, a joint partner of the Medical Drone Service. The MDS drone brightened up the booth alongside our ground station powered by Auterion.

The way up is the way out

Patrique, our founder, kicked off the Amsterdam Drone Week by giving a keynote during the opening session on urban air mobility. The main theme he addressed was the aerial revolution that is inevitable. 

With congestion becoming a major problem everywhere, this affects overall mobility and will only get worse as cities become more densely populated. Patrique believes the solution is unlocking the sky. He admits that integrating drones into urban air mobility won’t happen overnight and there will be a lot of hurdles along the way, but we must start somewhere. As he quoted himself,

I am not here to be an ambassador for Avy, I’m here to be an ambassador for the skies – because we need to

He took a stance and shared what him and other pioneers in the drone industry have been thinking: it’s a lot easier from up there. These powerful statements by Patrique, resonated through the crowd of like-minded people and sparked interesting discussion points throughout the course of the week.  

The take-away message? Change needs to happen fast.

Showcasing our lifesaving drone 

Whilst our Medical Service Drone was gleaming in yellow at our booth, the other Avy Aera was shining away at the showcase area, and stood out as the only fixed-wing drone. She posed alongside several other show stopping drones that were manufactured and created by Talaria, Flying basket, Wigs for Aid, Antwork. It was a great opportunity to demonstrate the different payloads that can be tailored to any given use case - well only for positive applications!

These payloads can range from: 

• Medbox → Maintain medical goods such as vaccines, blood products, and samples in cold chain conditions (2°C-8°C) 
• Gimballed Camera → Gain situational awareness and locate affected areas through real-time data
• Infrared Camera → Detect sources of heat like animals, people, or wildfires. Day and night
• Multispectral Camera → High definition eye in the sky for advanced soil and vegetation mapping ‍

Ready for takeoff

All in all the live demonstrations were a success! Seeing as it was Avy’s first live demonstration with the Avy Aera, the thrills, anticipation and nerves were high. However, despite some minor hiccups on day 1, when time was of the essence, the Avy crew was on top of everything, performing efficiently and fixing any issue that arose.

There was a host warming up the crowd and sharing our story: how at Avy we focus on developing long-range drones for lifesaving missions such as medical, first response and nature conservation. For the demonstration we weren’t able to fly fixed wing because of the size of the room, which meant the wing drone hovered.

The audience got quite a show when watching Avy Aera in action. She demonstrated a medical use case with the following storyline - transporting blood from a blood bank to a hospital. Two of our interns filled in as the medical stunts for this purpose.

You may have seen this through our Instagram stories, but if you missed out - next time be sure to tune in @flyavy! 

That’s a wrap

Our awesome Avy crew was comprised of a mix from the team, combining both tech and operations helped with answering all questions related to the aircraft and to engage in fruitful conversations. 

• Patrique the storyteller of Avy and ambassador of the skies, who hosted the first two demonstrations
• Remco, our business developer, hosting on the last day and busy discovering new possible use cases 
• Chris and Matteo as pilot and co-pilot who handled the flight very well
• Arjun and Riccardo our medical stunts, acted very professionally (could’ve been mistaken for real medics when loading and unloading the medical cargo)
• Emmy and Manon the marketing and communication champs who organised it with the RAI and made it happen 

We’re excited to participate in ADW 2020 and who knows by then we may be able to perform a BVLOS flight outside?