Skye Air Mobility Responds to DGCA's BVLoS Notice
In response to the Directorate General of Civil Aviation's (DGCA) Public Notice dated 4th July 2026 flagging the absence of an authorized BVLoS framework, Skye Air Mobility Pvt. Ltd. today set out its position on why India's unmanned traffic management layer should be sovereign.
It reaffirmed that Skye UTM, India's indigenously built Unmanned Traffic Management platform, is ready for deployment as the national backbone for safe, authorized and traceable BVLoS operations.
DGCA's notice tells operators that unapproved BVLoS flying carries no legal cover, and signals that a key enabler for scaling BVLoS safely is a robust, authorized traffic management framework. Building that framework calls for infrastructure that Indian regulators can inspect, Indian law can reach, and Indian security agencies can rely on.
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A UTM platform is not ordinary software. It is the ledger of everything that moves in the first few hundred feet above the country — flight paths, delivery corridors, approach routes to hospitals and industrial sites, and the operating patterns of critical infrastructure inspections. This is why Skye chose to build Skye UTM as a sovereign system from the outset: so that this ledger sits within Indian jurisdiction, governed by Indian law, with data and audit trails reachable by Indian courts and investigators when needed.
"DGCA's notice is a call to action, not just a caution," says Ankit Kumar, Founder and CEO, Skye Air Mobility.
"We believe the industry now has a clear, credible domestic alternative to consider. Skye UTM runs on Indian data rails and answers to Indian law. We would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate it to the Directorate and to support the Ministry's and DGCA's and AAI's efforts to bring it into the national framework."
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India's airspace, spectrum environment, weather systems and regulatory structure have distinct characteristics. Skye UTM was architected for these realities from the first line of code. India has already applied similar thinking to payments, identity and space — building the core layer domestically and letting an industry grow on top of it. We believe airspace management is well suited to the same approach, and Skye UTM was built with that in mind.
Low-altitude airspace is an increasingly important security surface, and traceability is central to managing it well. A sovereign UTM makes every authorized movement attributable in real time — the operator, the aircraft, the route and the purpose — helping enforcement agencies distinguish legitimate traffic from a potential threat quickly.
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Skye UTM is built to that standard. Data generated on the platform resides in India. Communications are protected with 256-bit encryption. The company is in active engagement with CERT-In on cybersecurity compliance, and the platform is designed so that authorized agencies can query it directly. Integration with the India Meteorological Department (IMD), ISRO's Bhuvan geospatial infrastructure and API Setu means the platform runs on government rails, inside the national data ecosystem, by design.
Skye Air Mobility has proactively reached out to DGCA, MoCA and AAI to bring Skye UTM into the national UTM framework and enable ATM-UTM integration. We would welcome the opportunity to demonstrate the platform against the Directorate's requirements, and to support the Ministry's and DGCA's work as they take this forward.
Skye Air Mobility is in active engagement with CERT-In on cybersecurity compliance, has signed an MoU with IIIT-Hyderabad, and is in process for Data Disseminator Authorization from IN-SPACe. The company is an active member of the Telecommunications Standards Development Society of India (TSDSI), participating in national standardisation of unmanned aviation and V2X communication frameworks.