For a patient waiting on blood in a hill-town hospital, or a postman staring at a flooded road in a Tamil Nadu village, the last few kilometres are often the hardest. Roads wind, rivers rise, and the clock keeps ticking. That is the gap a Chennai startup set out to close from the sky — with a small aircraft that takes off like a helicopter, flies like a plane, and now carries India’s aviation regulator’s stamp of approval. Meet the ATVA, the hybrid cargo drone from Amber Wings, the first of its kind in India to win DGCA type certification for commercial cargo flights.
Amber Wings is the unmanned-systems arm of Ubifly Technologies, incubated at IIT Madras and powered by the aerodynamic expertise of its sister company, The ePlane Company. In July 2025, its ATVA-1 became India’s first hybrid cargo drone to receive DGCA type certification — a clearance that lets it fly commercial missions around the clock, seven days a week, including at night. The company says no other cargo drone operator in India had been permitted to fly through the night until then.
A helicopter’s takeoff, an aeroplane’s wings
The ATVA-1 is a fixed-wing vertical take-off and landing aircraft with a 1.7-metre wingspan. It lifts off vertically from a rooftop or a clearing, then transitions to efficient winged flight — the company says it can carry up to 2 kg of cargo over 60 km, with a tested range of more than 55 km even when fully loaded. The drone was built over six prototypes and 10,000 km of flight testing, and work on it began in September 2023. Real-time kinematic positioning lets it land precisely on rooftops, a detail that matters enormously in India’s tightly packed cities.
Amber Wings’ ATVA hybrid VTOL cargo drone. Image: Amber Wings.
The certification was not a one-off. Amber Wings is one of the few Indian drone makers to hold two DGCA type certifications: the ATVA-1 for logistics, and Vihaa for agriculture. And the company moved quickly to put the approval to work, with early contracts in medical logistics and postal deliveries — medicines, vaccines and blood on one side, parcels and post on the other.
From the farm to the front line
The Vihaa shows how broad the team’s ambitions are. Where the ATVA-1 carries cargo, the Vihaa carries a spray tank, bringing the same autonomous flight stack to the fields. The two machines share the engineering DNA of a team that designs, builds and flies everything in-house.
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Amber Wings’ Vihaa agricultural drone. Image: Amber Wings.
In August 2026, Amber Wings unveiled the next step: the ATVA, a hybrid VTOL built for defence and logistics. The new aircraft carries up to 6 kg over more than 100 km, with an hour of endurance, and it brings a sharper set of eyes — multispectral sensors, high-definition thermal optics and stabilised 4K night-vision. Its in-house AI and onboard GPU compute enable beyond-visual-line-of-sight operations, and the company says it can carry ammunition, medical kits and communication hardware across contested terrain, where ground convoys cannot safely go.
See the ATVA in flight:
An ecosystem, not a single drone
The ATVA is the centre of a growing family. The ATVA-2, a heavier fixed-wing VTOL carrying more than 6 kg, was already in testing, and the roadmap stretches further: the Multi-50, a heavy-lift multicopter for payloads above 50 kg; the QuadCopter, pairing a 20-kg-plus payload with advanced imaging; and the e50 and e100 hybrid VTOLs, built for fast deliveries of 50 and 100 kg. An imaging variant of the ATVA-1 extends the same airframe into mapping, surveillance and precision agriculture.
Behind it all is a team led by Prof. Satya Chakravarthy, founder, chief and technical lead of Ubifly Technologies and an aerospace engineering professor at IIT Madras. “Receiving the DGCA Type Certification for our ATVA-1 is a moment of immense pride and a validation of our team’s relentless pursuit of excellence,” he said when the certification landed.
Why it matters
India’s drone market is racing toward Rs 5,000 crore by 2030, and the winners will be the companies that can fly legally, reliably and around the clock. Amber Wings has cleared the hardest bar first — the regulator’s — and it did so with an aircraft designed and built entirely in India. From blood packets over mountain roads to supplies across contested ground, the ATVA turns the last mile into a flight path. And with a heavier fleet already taking shape, this Chennai startup is building the sky-high logistics layer India’s remotest corners have been waiting for.
Keep reading: Beyond Roads, Towards the Sky: Inside Hapida Sky, the Almora Startup Flying a Homemade Electric Aircraft · Medicines Over Mountains: Inside TechEagle’s Vertiplane X3 Drone Delivery Network · More Aerospace & Defense stories
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