Certified aircraft, purpose-built droneports, and a battle-tested UTM stack have turned this Latin American startup into a global logistics force. It plans to launch in the United States next.
By: Dawn Zoldi
Drone delivery may make for good headlines, but the real success stories involve the spaces between the aircraft and the destination: software APIs, traffic deconfliction layers, regulated launch pads and remote operation centers staffed by certified pilots keeping eyes on every flight. Few companies outside the major Silicon Valley-funded players have wrestled with all of those pieces simultaneously. Fewer still have done it across five continents. Speedbird Aero is one of those few.
On a recent episode of the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, Speedbird CEO Manoel Coelho and Chief Innovation Officer Samuel Salomão walked through how their company evolved from a telemedicine spinout in Arizona to one of the most operationally mature drone delivery operators in the world. Their success revolves around regulatory strategy, software architecture and airframes.
The Telemedicine Origins of a Drone Delivery Pioneer
Speedbird Aerospace’s origins began in a clinic. Coelho and Salomão met while working for a global telemedicine company in Phoenix, Arizona that served the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs and deployed advanced diagnostic equipment to remote communities around the world. The business model enabled specialist consultations to reach a patient in a rural area. But the prescriptions, blood samples and medications still required physical transport. Salomão saw the gap and decided to fill it with rotorcraft.
“Samuel had the idea,” Coelho recalled. “The medical advice already arrives at the location, but medicines, prescriptions, medical samples, you had to transport the patients to do it.”
Salomão built prototype drones in Scottsdale. Those early prototype large-frame systems connected to the internet to execute what would today be called beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) flights, nearly a decade before the term entered mainstream regulatory vocabulary.
When the pair formally launched Speedbird Aero in 2018, they chose Brazil deliberately. ANAC, Brazil’s civil aviation authority, as a founding member of ICAO alongside the FAA, EASA, and Transport Canada, offered a more accessible regulatory environment for an emerging operator seeking certification rather than costly, one-off waivers.
Customized and Certified: The DLV Aircraft Lineage
From the outset, Coelho and Salomão drew a hard line that Speedbird’s aircraft would be certifiable systems, not commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) drones dressed up for logistics. Coelho explained, ”This had to be a certified aircraft. If you’re going to be doing BVLOS, flying over people, scaling, this had to be integrated with the airspace.”
The DLV (Delivery) series, hexacopters designed for payload, reliability and airspace integration, grew through multiple generations. Each iteration incorporated lessons from real commercial operations. The DLV-1 and DLV-2 became the first drone delivery aircraft certified by ANAC for remote, commercial BVLOS flights in Brazil, including night operations.
The fleet has since expanded to include the DLV-3, DLV-4, a fixed-wing variant, each purpose-built for different mission profiles, from urban food delivery to offshore ship-to-shore cargo runs. Speedbird deliberately designed the aircraft architecture as hardware-agnostic at the integration layer to enable the same software platform to orchestrate flights, regardless of which airframe is in the air.
UTM as Ecosystem, Not Product
Salomão framed Speedbird’s UTM approach not as a single system, but rather an ecosystem of interoperable services that must work in concert. “You have to find a way to manage multiple drones, multiple flights and how you deconflict things. It’s not just one system,” Salomão explained. “You are talking about several different systems that work together.” This includes weather data providers, remote identification (Remote ID) services, flight authorization platforms, conflict deconfliction engines and air traffic interfaces.
Speedbird’s platform, developed by Salomão over years of field operations, functions as a software orchestration layer rather than a conventional ground control station (GCS). It ingests real-time data from supplemental data service providers (SDSPs) and UAS service suppliers (USSs), connects via open APIs to partner UTM systems, and gives remote pilots a unified operational picture regardless of the regulatory jurisdiction they are flying in.
In Singapore, for example, Coelho noted, that means integrating live maritime traffic data to dynamically re-route aircraft around ships at anchor to minimize both air and ground risk simultaneously. “We get real-time data on the ships,” he said. “That reduces the ground risk, and then you have the air risk with Changi Airport, where we are connected to one of the UTM providers that Skyports selected.”
That agnosticism is a strategic choice. Speedbird does not attempt to own the entire UTM stack. Instead, it builds to interoperate. In Israel, the company partnered with High Lander, whose Universal UTM system enabled Speedbird to execute the longest BVLOS drone delivery flight in Israeli history, 16 kilometers, and to complete the first-ever drone takeoff from the Ilan and Asaf Ramon International Airport in Eilat.
In the United Kingdom, Skyports handles the infrastructure layer, as Speedbird aircraft deliver mail daily between the Orkney Islands through a permanent, operational corridor that has been running since the partners’ Royal Mail deployment in Scotland in 2023.
Hardened by Adversity: Lessons from Israel and Beyond
Speedbird’s four-year stint in Israel did more than build partnerships. It stress-tested the company’s resilience. Operating in an environment where GPS jamming and spoofing are daily realities forced Salomão and his engineering team to build redundancy and signal resilience into the core stack. “We could only simulate jamming and spoofing in the past. In Israel, we could actually live it and make our solutions more robust,” Coelho said.
That experience, combined with regulatory navigation across ANAC, EASA and Israel’s civil aviation authority, have given Speedbird a unique cross-jurisdictional regulatory literacy. The company has now achieved its first STS-01 (specific category) certification in Italy and operates under EASA’s framework across multiple member states, including Portugal, the home of its European headquarters and regulatory beachhead. Portugal’s ANAC shares both a name and deep institutional ties with its Brazilian counterpart, which creates a natural pathway into the 27-state EU market.
Droneports: Infrastructure Defined by Safety, Not Architecture
On the physical side of infrastructure, Salomão offered a pragmatic definition of the “droneport,” a term the industry has yet to standardize. Speedbird’s approach treats every launch and recovery site like a scaled-down airport, with defined safety perimeters, either fenced ground-level pads or elevated container-top platforms, standard operating procedures and checklists for payload loading.
“A droneport in our vision is like a heliport or an airport,” Salomão said. “It has to be a safe location. There are procedures, people have checklists, and it has to be very similar to what an airport looks like, just at another scale.”
Speedbird’s aircraft support both precision landing and winch-based delivery, which provides operators with flexibility in dense urban environments where rooftop or backyard landings are not feasible. Speedbird is also developing smart locker integration at strategically placed pick-up points near droneports that serve high-density residential areas. These will be particularly relevant for European and Brazilian cities where the detached-home backyard model common in U.S. suburban drone delivery does not apply.
The Human in the Loop: Remote Operations as a Safety Culture
One of the most instructive lessons from Speedbird’s six-plus years of continuous commercial food delivery, the oldest active drone delivery route in the world, operating seven days a week, ten hours a day, came not from a technology failure but from a staffing arrangement. Early in the program, BVLOS pilots sat physically inside the shopping mall adjacent to the launch pad. This exposed them to the operational pressures of food delivery and customer complaints. Removing those pilots to a centralized remote operations center transformed the safety culture.
“Removing the pilot from that location actually created a safety culture that was paramount,” Coelho explained. “Regardless of what’s happening, the pilot is focused on flying or monitoring. It’s a human in the loop.”
That centralized operations center in Brazil now supports multiple simultaneous mission types from food delivery, medical logistics, offshore oil rig support and ship-to-shore cargo, with the same pilot pool transitioning between tasks. Emergency backup centers stand ready in the event of regional disruption. The model treats remote piloting with the same crew-resource-management discipline as commercial aviation: defined pilot-in-command roles, communication protocols and escalation procedures.
The U.S. Market: Timing, Part 108 and Homecoming
Speedbird’s decision to delay a formal U.S. market entry has been deliberate. Coelho spent years watching competitors burn capital on expensive one-off waivers under the Part 107 framework and concluded that scalability required a rules-based environment. Part 108, the FAA’s forthcoming BVLOS rule, and Part 146, the companion UTM regulation, now provide the regulatory infrastructure Speedbird has been waiting for.
The timing is finally right. Rumor has it that the FAA has completed the Part 108/146 rulemaking package, which is now at the Department of Transportation and moving toward the Office of Management and Budget, with a possible summer 2026 publication.
And so Speedbird now seeks U.S. partners. ”We are patient to make sure that when we land here, we start with the right partnerships,” Coelho said. “This is aviation. It takes time. It takes investment. It takes patience.”
The company has already conducted visible operations in Chicago, the Great Lakes region, and Detroit. Coelho recently visited Phoenix, the city where Speedbird’s story began, to actively negotiate the company’s U.S. manufacturing and operational footprint. Manoel Coelho and other Speedbird leaders are also expected to visit the U.S. for AUVSI XPONENTIAL in May 2026 in Detroit as part of the Law-Tech Connect Scholar’s program. To network with them, register for Law-Tech Connect and it’s related happy hour at XPONENTIAL. Details for both are available under the Events tab on the Autonomy Global website,
Speedbird Aero is actively seeking UTM, logistics, and infrastructure partners for U.S. market entry. Those interested can reach out directly through the company’s European and Brazilian offices.
Watch the complete episode featuring Manoel Coelho and Samuel Salomão on the Dawn of Autonomy podcast, Episode 116, on the Autonomy Global Network.For prior coverage of Speedbird Aero, including previous podcast appearances, articles, and profiles written by Dawn Zoldi, search “Speedbird Aero” directly on autonomyglobal.co.