The first phase of the DigiSky — a platform envisioned to primarily provide flight clearances for drone operations in India — will go live on October 2, Civil Aviation Ministry Joint Secretary Amber Dubey announced at a press conference on Thursday. Once live, the platform will integrate with other government entities, allow management of airspace workflows, plan drone flights, and log post-flight data submission among other things. IT services company Happiest Minds was tasked with developing the DigiSky platform. The COVID-19 lockdowns have delayed the project quite a bit, Dubey said, even as he hoped that “most” of DigiSky’s functionality would be up and running by the October deadline. According to current drone regulations, a clearance is required from the DGCA before each drone takes flight. Called NPNT (no permission no takeoff), it is conceptually a green signal without which drones aren’t authorised to fly. It is the DigiSky platform that will give drones an NPNT clearance, essentially by providing a security key to it. A functional DigiSky platform essentially means that only NPNT compliant drones will be able to dot India’s skylines, which drone regulations mandate. More importantly, a functional DigiSky platform allows various government agencies to obtain proper clearance to fly drones from the Civil Aviation Ministry, something that has hardly been adhered to so far — a fact which MediaNama has thoroughly documented in its reporting from Delhi, Mumbai, Amritsar, Kerala, and Telangana. All green zones cleared for drones to fly: Dubey also revealed that drones can…
