Ørsted and Skyports complete heavy-cargo drone trial at Hornsea 2 offshore wind farm

TLDR

• Ørsted and Skyports Drone Services ran a four-week cargo-drone trial at the Hornsea 2 offshore wind farm, flying maintenance kits weighing up to 65 kg between a service vessel and turbine tops.¹²
• The trial included the companies' first beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) delivery inside a wind farm, a roughly 4-kilometre flight approved under the UK Civil Aviation Authority's framework.¹²
• A new automatic-hook load-collection method let the drone pick up and drop off kits without a technician manually attaching each load.¹²
• Turbines kept generating power during deliveries, and fewer vessel trips mean lower fuel use, emissions and lifting-related risk to technicians.¹²

Ørsted has completed a cargo-drone trial at Hornsea 2, its North Sea offshore wind farm, with drone operator Skyports Drone Services, calling it their most complex offshore wind cargo-drone trial to date.¹² Over four weeks, the project team, drawing on safety, aviation, warehousing and site-operations specialists, flew maintenance kits weighing roughly 55-65 kg between a Service Operations Vessel and individual turbines, delivering tools and parts before technicians arrived and retrieving the kits afterward.¹²

The trial introduced a new automatic-hook load-collection method, letting operators skip manually attaching each bag to the drone, and it ran within the UK Civil Aviation Authority's regulatory framework.¹² It also marked a first for the companies: a BVLOS delivery of about 4 kilometres flown entirely inside the wind farm, planned, coordinated and monitored from a specialist service vessel, with the CAA supporting the airspace approvals.¹² "These drones give wind farm operators like Ørsted a practical way to reduce lifting and vessel movements, get technicians working faster and maximise the time turbines spend generating," said Alex Brown, chief executive of Skyports Drone Services.¹ Richard McCrilley, project lead at Ørsted, said the trial "confirms our approach to integrating drone-enabled maintenance into our routine operations," citing the ability to cover both planned and ad hoc flight requests.¹

Because turbines could keep generating while deliveries were underway, and drone flights replace some lifting operations and vessel trips, the companies say the approach can cut lost production, fuel use, emissions and technicians' exposure to lifting work in changing sea conditions.¹²

Why it matters: this is a heavy-lift (65-kg-class) cargo drone trial running inside a live, operating offshore wind farm rather than a one-off demo, with a genuine BVLOS leg flown under real CAA oversight, evidence that offshore energy operators could use drones to cut the vessel and helicopter logistics that currently drive much of the cost and risk of turbine maintenance.