Aera

The Aera is an electric fixed-wing drone with vertical take-off and landing capability, built by the Amsterdam-based Avy since around 2020. It carries a 1.5-kilogram payload across a 2.3-metre wingspan, cruises at roughly 75 km/h, and stays aloft for about ninety minutes on a single charge. Avy has positioned the aircraft for a mix of civil and defence roles — coastal and maritime surveillance, search-and-rescue, medical logistics, and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance work over open water.

The design brings together the two flight regimes that have historically forced operators to choose one or the other. Four rotors lift the aircraft vertically from a small footprint, then a pusher propeller takes over for forward flight. Avy has said the platform is wind-resistant to Beaufort 5–6, which matters more for maritime operators than any headline speed figure — most fixed-wing tail-sitters and small multirotors simply cannot launch and recover in North Sea conditions. Sensor payloads are modular: electro-optical and infrared gimbals for surveillance, a small cargo bay for medical deliveries, and an automatic identification system receiver for vessel tracking. The aircraft is designed to fly beyond visual line of sight autonomously — taking off, executing a mission, and returning without a pilot on the sticks — and Avy has built weatherproof docking stations that let the drone recharge and re-launch without a person on site.

The Netherlands is the aircraft’s principal operator. The Dutch Coastguard (Kustwacht) has flown the Aera on trials over the North Sea, and Avy has worked with the ANWB Medical Air Assistance service on medical-logistics tests, including delivering automated external defibrillators to remote incidents. Beyond national users, Avy has reported customer trials with offshore wind operators and with maritime authorities elsewhere in Europe. The company has not published fleet numbers.

Avy has not disclosed the flight stack running onboard, and independent teardown reporting on the Aera is limited. What is public is the aircraft’s role as a testbed for the Dutch civil aviation authority’s BVLOS certification process — an early attempt in Europe to move autonomous fixed-wing operations out of trial airspace and into routine civil service, work Avy has cited as central to its go-to-market.

The Aera occupies a narrow niche between the small quadcopters that most European police forces and coastguards already fly and the larger tactical UAVs a national air force would field. Its closest peers are fixed-wing VTOL platforms like the Quantum Systems Trinity and the Delair UX11, sold into the same civil-and-defence borderland, where the Aera’s electric propulsion and docking-station concept remain what distinguish it.