This week, the first BVLOS food delivery operation in Indonesia was announced and is now operational in controlled airspace associated with an international airport.

A2Z Drone Delivery announced that Grab, Southeast Asia’s largest ride-hailing and food delivery app, and SKYY Network, a commercial drone services provider focused on BVLOS operations, selected the company as their drone technology partner for a drone delivery pilot in Bali, Indonesia. The project is running food delivery missions between Café del Mar Bali and Nuanu Creative City to test how drone delivery can work alongside existing ground-based delivery operations.

As part of the pilot project, which is already operational, A2Z Drone Delivery is supplying its A2Z Longtail Dual, its latest airframe announced earlier this year, as well as its A2Z AirDocks. According to the company, its airframe was chosen for “its combination of long-range commercial capability and redundant safety features designed for operations in complex BVLOS environments.” A2Z Drone Delivery also points to the drone’s one-to-one flight-time-to-charge-time ratio, which gets the aircraft back in the air quickly after a mission. The AirDocks charge the aircraft autonomously, so technicians do not need to manually swap batteries.

“This drone delivery project is ideally suited to our commercial drone ecosystem in which our aircraft and docking solutions minimize the human interactions with the drones and payloads to reduce the unit economics of each individual logistics flight, a key element to enabling the project to scale to full autonomous fleet operations across the region,” said Aaron Zhang, CEO of A2Z Drone Delivery. 

Along with A2Z Drone Delivery, SKYY Network and Grab bring their respective expertise to the pilot project, which connects Nuanu Creative City, a 44-hectare development that is popular with tourists, with the hospitality services at Café del Mar Bali. SKYY Network has a long track record of conducting complex BVLOS operations across multiple countries, while Grab, according to one estimate, holds 55 percent of the food delivery market in Southeast Asia.

This project is operating in controlled airspace associated with Bali’s Ngurah Rai International Airport. A2Z’s in-house developed ground control station, CloudOS, is serving as the software layer for managing the delivery missions. The operation is being conducted under a certificate issued by Indonesia's Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA), and this certificate applies the same SORA regulatory risk assessments that define drone-delivery regulations across Europe.

Grab Indonesia’s Bali Nusra Region operational head, Prisca Yosevine, made clear that the goal is to complement the company’s “Driver-Partners.”

“The technology is not intended to replace our Driver-Partners, but to complement their role and help us explore more efficient hybrid logistics models,” she said. “Gaining these insights responsibly is crucial.”

For SKYY Network, A2Z says the AirDock infrastructure could serve as a platform for missions beyond individual delivery routes, including drone-as-first-responder services, offshore logistics operations, and ship-to-shore port deliveries.