Baltic Sea. Narrow weather window. First-time route. The objective: deliver critical parts to the top of a wind turbine hundreds of feet up, inside RWE's Arkona Offshore Wind Farm – an active wind farm that doesn't care about your schedule or making things easy.
The mission was designed to demonstrate that our V2 aircraft could reliably resupply offshore turbines faster and safer than conventional crew transfer vessels. From shore we'd fly BVLOS (beyond visual line of sight), transition from wing-borne cruise to VTOL, then stay offset under blade height until computer vision confirmed we were lined up. Only then would we make our sidestep to the basket, drop, and exit the way we came. Aborts were wired at every gate. If anything looked off, the aircraft would snap back to cruise and reset.
Mark Agate, Flight Controls Engineer at Skyways, had spent months architecting this approach from Austin. Tight tolerances, but manageable.
Then came the Thursday before the first drop. Our customers, RWE and Skyports, were scheduled to start flying Monday. They surfaced new landing realities from their site survey in Germany: a tailwind corridor out of the port that hadn't shown up in earlier planning. Depending on wind direction, they'd have to take off or land with a tailwind – something you typically avoid. And by typically, we mean always. So, this wasn't simply threading the needle. It was threading the needle while someone shook the sewing machine. From 5,000 miles away.
What saved the schedule wasn't heroic last-minute flying. It was infrastructure Mark and the team had built over years. SkyNav – our in-house mission-planning system – auto-generated and simulated the full approach, while eight years of logged flight data let us validate the tailwind adjustments with confidence instead of guesswork. The V2 aircraft itself represented years of design, mechanical refinement, weatherproofing, and reliability testing. All of this allowed us to adjust mission parameters quickly, validate against real-world data, and ship the solution in less than 48 hours.
"It was a drop-everything moment to get this resolved for the customer," Mark explains. "It's not just being fast – it's being fast and reliable. If we push things out that don't work, the customer's blocked and our reputation is hurt. Doing it fast and right is huge."
Peter Lawson, Flight Operations Manager at Skyports, saw the responsiveness firsthand. "The level of detail we got back allowed us to make a really clear and concise decision on that risk," he recalls. "It caused less than 24 hours delay to the project – that swift response from Skyways was really helpful."
That speed isn't luck. It's the product of eight years of logged flight data and the infrastructure to access it instantly – turning field discoveries into validated, confident updates while competitors are still prototyping.
As our CEO Charles Acknin says, "The real world is the ultimate educator."
This is the work at Skyways: fly real missions under real constraints, then fold the learning directly back into the product development. Because when you're dropping cargo onto a turbine in 30-knot winds with under 20 feet of blade clearance, "mostly confident" doesn't cut it.
On paper, the Arkona operation looks like three weeks of BVLOS missions over the Baltic Sea. The assignment was clear: fly automated ~50-mile round trips from RWE's operation and maintenance base in Rügen, Germany, carrying cargo of up to 22 lbs, demonstrating the ability of Skyways aircraft to help energy companies get critical parts quickly to hard-to-reach assets.
What the mission actually represents is years of compound learning: manufacturing refinements, weatherproofing iterations, software loops closing tighter with each mission, and international logistics systems that most companies wouldn't attempt until they had venture-scale funding.
Our collective team – Skyways and Skyports working together – started whiteboarding the approach back in January. Not rough concepts, but detailed approach paths, abort scenarios, and computer vision lock criteria. Harry Plested, Offshore Program Manager at Skyports, made multiple site visits to the turbines, sending back photos of the drop area, the approach patterns, the operational constraints the team would be working within. That field intelligence fed directly into Mark's design work in Austin.
"Harry went to the turbines a couple times, sent us pictures of what the drop area was going to look like, the approach paths, patterns," Mark recalls. "Really, Skyports was huge on giving us that full concept of operations. And then we handled the design and testing of automated abort procedures."
The testing wasn't gentle. The flight test team ran intentional abort scenarios, disabling links to the aircraft mid-flight, degrading systems to see how the automation responded under pressure. Mark credits "the high caliber of the flight test team at Skyways and their professionalism in being able to operate with an intentionally deteriorating system."
By the time Skyports took delivery of the aircraft and flew their own workups in Germany, they were operating independently. No Skyways engineers hovering over shoulders. No safety nets. Just an aircraft, a mission plan, and the confidence that comes from thorough preparation.
"What Skyways allowed us to achieve was that adaptability," Peter explains. "They set up a paging system which allowed us to raise concerns fast, easily, and concisely. No matter what time it was in Texas for them, we had someone willing to jump online and give us live support. That's something I've never experienced to that level with an OEM."
Harry Plested, Offshore Program Manager at Skyports, credits the platform's maturity: “There's no one, no other OEMs on the market, offering the same level of capability as Skyways, with the maturity required to deploy it with a customer."
Half the story is in the numbers. Prior to this mission, crew transfer vessels took roughly 2 hours for a one way trip to service turbines 25 miles offshore. And typically parts would go out with the crew the next day – which meant waiting a full 24 hours to make repairs. With Skyways, it's about 26 minutes, shore to turbine, on demand. That means faster maintenance cycles, safer resupply, and more time for turbines to spin and earn.
The other half is what those numbers represent: a fundamental shift in how offshore operations work – and the potential to reshape logistics on a much larger scale. This isn't about replacing crew transfer vessels – it's about augmenting them. Skyways handles the time-critical, small-part emergencies that can't wait for the next scheduled boat run. For a wind farm, this isn't a convenience. It's getting your day back. It's being able to respond to issues before they grow and cutting back on sending technicians via vessels in harsh weather when all they need is a critical component to complete the job.
For logistics more broadly, it's about moving beyond one-off deliveries to on-demand networks. A hybrid model where vessels handle crew transport and scheduled cargo runs, while autonomous aircraft provide rapid-response capability for urgent parts. Centralized warehouses serving distributed assets. Automated systems where one operator monitors ten aircraft instead of crews navigating in boats. Better tracking, reduced workload, lower costs. "Where we're headed is there are hundreds of these, and you're flying parts on demand," Mark explains. Not just faster – more reliable, more sustainable, at a lower cost, because the system works.
"Delivering what matters, where it matters, when it matters is what we do," Charles says. It's not a promise. It's what happened on repeat during the Arkona mission.
Missions like these don't come along without great partners.
RWE provided the real operating context with an active wind farm. Skyports handled the regulatory heavy lifting, coordinating approvals across two regulators and five airspace stakeholders, working through hundreds of hours of documentation to clear the operational pathway. They surveyed sites, ran independent workups, and fed changes into Skyways' loop. That kind of partnership is how you prove a product under real constraints, building trust through delivery, not marketing.
The validation came directly from the customer. "The trial has proved that drones give us flexibility. In offshore, flexibility is power," says Vivek Trivedi, O&M Optimisation Manager at RWE. "They allow us to react faster, reduce waiting times, and optimize resources. It's a whole new dimension of efficiency. Long term, we see that drone operations could become part of a hybrid logistics model for operating and maintaining our offshore wind fleet."
This is an industry where demos and tests are common. What isn't? Delivering exactly what you say you will, in the real world, with conditions that can't be fully mimicked in a simulator.
"Skyways is rebuilding trust in the industry by doing what we said we're going to do," Charles says. In a sector plagued by vaporware and over-promise, simply showing up and executing isn't just good business. It's a competitive advantage.
The Arkona Playbook
Here's what it actually looked like on the ground – or rather, 25 miles offshore in the Baltic.
Route and Environment
We flew automated ~50-mile round trips from the shore base out to Arkona. The cruise route to the wind farm was straightforward – we've flown longer distances in worse conditions. But once inside the farm, the design work got serious. We had to fly under turbine blade height the entire time, meaning we couldn't even use altitude separation. Every meter of that path had to be precise, because running into a turbine isn't something you get to troubleshoot twice.
Time and Payloads
Our V2 aircraft took about 26 minutes per flight, carrying up to ~22 lbs of cargo. For context, the crew transfer vessel alternative takes roughly 2 hours round trip. The time savings aren't just convenient – they're operational. When a turbine needs a specialized part or tool, those 90+ minutes matter.
Clearances
During the final descent to the basket, the aircraft held less than 10 meters from the nearest blade – about 30 feet – and executed the airdrop approximately 3 meters above the target. Mark didn't worry much about precision at that point: in three years at Skyways, he couldn't remember a time when we didn't drop a package directly on the target. Close enough to be useful, far enough to stay safe.
The Approach
The sidestep maneuver was borrowed from conventional aviation – the same technique controllers use when they line you up on one parallel runway, then tell you to sidestep to the other. Our aircraft would cruise inbound, de-transition to VTOL, then execute a lateral translation toward the turbine. The key was staying offset until computer vision locked on the target. Only after confirming the lock would the aircraft sidestep in, make the drop, sidestep back out, and transition to cruise. The design kept maximum separation at all times except during the actual drop.
Automation and Aborts
Commit and abort criteria were wired at every gate. If anything looked off – loss of vision lock, unexpected system behavior, position drift – the aircraft would abort back to cruise and reset. No judgment calls in the moment, just clear rules executed automatically. The goal was converting high-workload emergencies into low-workload monitoring tasks.
Blade State
For these drops, the destination turbine's blades were locked. But the rest of the farm was live – active turbines with spinning blades throughout the approach and departure routes. That's why we stayed under blade height and offset until vision lock. Threading the needle while everything around you keeps spinning.
At the center of everything is SkyNav, Skyways' ground control and automated mission planning system. Operators set a few anchors (takeoff, drop, landing) and SkyNav generates the rest, including altitude gates, the under-blade sidestep, and data checks that keep humans out of the error loop.
Mark led the approach path architecture, sidestep design, and cross-team integration. When Skyports surfaced the tailwind corridor days before go-time, the team had the infrastructure to respond. The advantage wasn't just eight years of flight data – it was instant access to it. Logs feed regression and aggregation pipelines so fixes are fast, repeatable, and safe. Measure twice, ship once, then verify again.
That's the compounding advantage at work. While competitors iterate on prototypes, Skyways refines systems proving themselves in the field, over many years.
Every mission that pushes the envelope generates data that doesn't exist anywhere else. This one was no exception. Here's what we learned and what we're building on:
Technical: The Tailwind Problem
Days before launch, Skyports surfaced an operational constraint: the coastal departure corridor meant they'd have to take off or land with a tailwind depending on wind direction. We'd historically avoided that. But we had data – RIMPAC operations on moving ships had exposed the aircraft to similar conditions – so we knew it was within reach.
The fix required adjusting the approach logic to handle non-headwind operations within conservative limits, adding data-driven refinements, and embedding clear abort criteria. The Skyways team’s process was methodical: pull the relevant historical data, validate it's reasonable, meet with flight ops and project leads to agree on the path forward, simulate extensively, then communicate expectations and abort procedures to Skyports before they flew. First safe update shipped in about 48 hours.
Operational: Weatherproofing Pays Off
Three weeks of operations in rain and high winds – conditions that would ground less robust platforms. The aircraft performed, validating years of weatherproofing and mechanical refinement. There was one hiccup: a dirty airframe reduced computer vision performance, which cost us a couple days of potential drops. It's the kind of thing you don't discover in controlled testing. Now it's a design input for making the vision system more resilient in austere environments.
Team: Intentional Risk Testing
Flight test ran high-risk test plans specifically designed to stress the abort automation – disabling links to the aircraft, intentionally degrading system awareness – to prove the software would behave correctly under failure conditions. Mark ran extensive simulation testing and automated tests to cover every failure case he could think of. The collaboration extended across the team: Brandon and Blake from the Skyways software engineering team, helped work through race conditions in the code, flight ops validated the approach in the field, and the result was a system Skyports could operate independently, without Skyways personnel on-site.
Strategic: Compounding Advantage
The Arkona mission validated what offshore operations at scale can look like – not just for wind farms, but for the broader vision. Post-Arkona, the focus shifts to scaling production and expanding commercial operations. The V2 hybrid eVTOL flown here proved the concept; V3, targeting 1000+ miles and ~100 lb payloads, will expand what's possible for longer island-to-island, offshore, and base-to-base routes. Every mission widens the operational envelope. The data doesn't just prove what we did – it compounds into what we do next.
Customer: Operational Transferability
The Arkona mission proved our systems and aircraft can be adopted and deployed by customers—giving us the ability to scale. Skyports operated the V2 aircraft throughout the three-week deployment, executing one of the most complex autonomous missions attempted in offshore wind energy operations. This wasn't a vendor demonstration – it was a customer running independent operations, making real-time decisions, managing risks. That level of operational maturity is rare: our customers don't need to become aircraft experts, they need systems robust enough to deploy confidently with appropriate support infrastructure. And the ability to take over decisively—using hotkeys and pre-briefed emergency procedures—to execute the safest action in the worst-case scenario.
Offshore wind is just one of the many environments Skyways is built for. Harsh, high stakes, unforgiving of hand-waving. Delivering on schedule and within inches isn't a headline for the team – it's just another day at the office.
That operational reality creates differentiation that specifications alone can't capture. "We've done due diligence on about 100 different OEMs in the last few years," Harry Plested reflects. "The biggest differentiator between who builds a product and a great product is: who's actually flying? Aircraft can look really shiny stood in a hangar, but unless you've got a flight test team continuously improving the aircraft in real operations, it's a pointless waste of time."
The Arkona mission wasn't a controlled demonstration – it was Skyports operating independently in one of the most complex offshore environments imaginable, with their customer's operations depending on successful execution. That's the standard Skyways holds itself to: not just flying, but enabling customers to fly confidently.
While it's regular to our team, actual repeated logistics through some of the most challenging operational environments is rare. Operating at these distances, through these conditions, with this level of reliability is only the beginning. We're just getting started.
What problem does autonomous offshore cargo delivery solve?
Rapid delivery of small, time-critical parts that can't wait for scheduled crew transfer vessel runs. On-demand parts delivery in ~26 minutes versus ~2 hours by crew transfer vessel. Skyways complements existing logistics infrastructure by handling urgent, small-payload deliveries – enabling faster maintenance response without replacing the vessels needed for scheduled runs and bulk transport. Safer resupply in harsh weather, and less downtime for offshore wind turbines and energy operations.
How precise are Skyways' offshore wind turbine cargo drops?
Computer vision-guided airdrops descend to approximately 3 meters above the target basket while maintaining ~10 meters (30 feet) from the nearest turbine blade at minimum separation. In three years of operations, Skyways has consistently delivered packages directly on target.
What is the sidestep approach for wind turbine deliveries?
An offset VTOL flight path that keeps the aircraft under blade height and laterally separated from the turbine structure. After computer vision locks on the target, the aircraft translates laterally to the basket. If any gate fails, automated aborts return the aircraft to cruise mode.
How did partners contribute to the Arkona mission?
With support and training from Skyways, the Skyports Drone Services team led the mission, conducted site surveys, ran independent flight workups, and provided operational feedback that informed flight parameters. Separately, Skyports navigated the complex regulatory approval process across multiple jurisdictions and airspace authorities. RWE provided offshore wind farm operating context and access to Arkona for the mission. The collaboration enabled Skyports to operate the aircraft independently without Skyways personnel on-site.
What aircraft was used for offshore wind turbine deliveries?
Skyways V2 hybrid eVTOL with ~450-500 mile range and ~30 lb payload capacity. The V2 has flown longer distances in worse conditions elsewhere; the challenge was precision navigation inside an active wind farm under blade height.
What conditions did Skyways handle during offshore operations?
High winds up to ~29.7 knots, rain, BVLOS flights over water for ~50-mile round trips, and under-blade transit inside an active wind farm with tight clearances requiring precision within meters of turbine structures.
What did Skyways learn from the Arkona offshore mission?
How to safely expand the operational envelope for tailwind takeoffs and landings within 48 hours using historical flight data. The importance of keeping airframes clean for computer vision performance in maritime environments. The value of automated abort criteria and clear commit/abort logic for safe autonomous operations.
What's next for Skyways offshore and autonomous cargo operations?
Scaling production by integrating V2 aircraft learnings to V3 next-generation platform (1000+ mile range, ~100 lb payload) for longer offshore, island-to-island, and military logistics routes. Expanding BVLOS operations with commercial companies and government partners globally.
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