Exclusive: How Windracers ULTRA cargo drone aims to leapfrog Africa’s transport gap
September 13, 2025
Stephen Wright has been working towards one moment for nearly a decade. “I thought we’d be flying in one year, and it’s been eight years now,” the Windracers chairman and founder told AGN. “So when we finally do fly in Malawi, that will be a very proud moment.”
For Wright, a former investment banker who turned entrepreneur, the Malawi hub represents the fulfilment of the mission he set out when founding Windracers: to make cargo transport cheaper, faster, and more reliable for communities that need it most.
ULTRA: An unglamorous but vital aircraft
The ULTRA drone has been described as the “flying transit van” of the skies. Wright embraces that analogy. The twin-engine autonomous cargo drone, built to carry up to 150–160 kilograms over long distances with swappable pods, isn’t sleek or powerful, but it’s designed with purpose.
“It’s decidedly unglamorous,” he said. “It’s a piece of kit for just transporting cargo around and to do it as efficiently as possible, and ultimately, at the lowest cost possible.”
While many startups chase electric or even hydrogen propulsion for the next generation of cargo haulers, Windracers has opted for simplicity. The ULTRA is powered by a pair of Rotax piston engines – small, reliable units widely used in light aircraft – chosen for their proven performance, global support network, and ease of maintenance in the field.
Crucially, they can run on either avgas or standard unleaded petrol, making the aircraft far more practical to operate in remote regions than platforms dependent on new zero-carbon infrastructure.
That pragmatism extends to the airframe itself. Constructed primarily from lightweight composites, the ULTRA combines ruggedness with efficiency. Its avionics suite enables fully autonomous flight from engine start to shutdown, yet the systems are deliberately kept to a minimum to reduce complexity, cost, and maintenance burden.
The result is a workhorse drone designed to be as straightforward to deploy as it is transformative in its mission, capable of delivering cargo as cheaply as possible.
“Every euro we can save in a transportation cost means a euro’s worth of aid to the people who really need it,” Wright stressed. “That euro makes a big difference.”
The economics are simple but unforgiving. The benchmark for ‘cheap’ cargo delivery, Wright explained, is $1/kg/100 km. “We feel we can get significantly below that, and if we do, our addressable market opens up exponentially,” he said.
But reaching that target is about more than just aircraft design.
“You need to work on your operating costs, the level of utilisation you get, as well as the platform itself,” Wright said. “It’s pure maths: you need to carry a significant amount of cargo, and you need to carry it a long distance.”
Autonomy by design, regulation by necessity
The ULTRA was designed to fly autonomously from the start. It can taxi, take off, fly a pre-programmed mission, deliver its cargo, return to base, land, and switch off.
At its core is a triple-redundant autopilot and avionics suite, which handles navigation, stability, and mission control. Waypoints and delivery profiles are uploaded before flight, and the aircraft follows them automatically.
Most missions involve air-dropping cargo pods or landing at basic strips to unload. The autonomy software manages these manoeuvres, optimised to minimise risk and fuel burn.
“It literally doesn’t need a human being around,” Wright noted, but added that regulation is holding back the full potential of such platforms. In most jurisdictions (UK, EU, US), drones must remain within the operator’s visual line of sight, or special waivers must be granted. Regulations often require a dedicated pilot or operator for each UAV, sometimes with additional observers for safety.
“Ultimately, unmanned aviation often involves more men and women than manned aviation,” Wright noted. “That’s down to the regulators. Our biggest cost is having people on the ground, even though the aircraft can fly itself.”
Regulations are beginning to change. In the UK, the CAA has published a roadmap to get to routine beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations by 2027. The EU allows BVLOS via authorisation using the Specific Operations Risk Assessment (SORA) methodology. And in the US, the FAA has recently published a proposed rule to expand BVLOS operations without case-by-case waivers.
Even with these regulatory moves, authorisations typically work on an approval process, which takes time and adds cost to the mission. Airspace rules, particularly integration with manned aviation, remain conservative, and air traffic management systems are still being built out and tested.
In the meantime, to get the ULTRA off the ground, Windracers has pursued what Wright calls ‘regulatory arbitrage,’ shifting testing and deployment to friendlier jurisdictions. That has meant test campaigns in the United States, a SORA licence through Norway, defence applications in Ukraine, and, crucially, humanitarian approvals in Malawi.
Why Windracers picked Malawi for its first ULTRA base
In places like Malawi, the authorities are more permissive because air traffic is light and the risks are lower. There, Windracers has approval to fly ULTRA fully autonomously.
But more than that, Africa, Wright believes, is where drones like ULTRA can make the biggest impact.
“Transportation is pretty fundamental,” he said. “Sometimes it’s not even a matter of cost; you just can’t get the stuff to people. And in the reverse direction, they can’t get their products to market.”
Africa has about 7 km of road per 100 km² of land, compared to 122 km/100 km² in Europe. Roughly 80% of Africa’s roads are unpaved, making them impassable in rainy seasons, and even paved roads often deteriorate quickly because of underinvestment in upkeep.
“Africa will never build the kind of road networks we have in Europe — and it doesn’t need to,” Wright said. “With mobile telephony, they leapfrogged fixed-line networks. I think drones will be the leapfrog technology in transportation.”
Windracers has established an operational base in the Central Region of Malawi, at Kasungu Airfield, which will include a newly built hangar to house ULTRA aircraft. The company has worked closely with the Malawi Civil Aviation Authority and the country’s Meteorological Services to bake in regulatory compliance from the start and allow real missions to take place.
“Malawi has a lot of advantages,” Wright explained. “It’s quite high up, which is a good test for the aircraft. The climate is benign. It has all the classic logistics challenges: remote locations, long distances, lack of infrastructure. But it’s also secure and stable. From a legal and regulatory point of view, they’re probably the leading edge in Africa.”
Starting in October 2025, the base will host long-distance demonstration and proof-of-concept missions focused on humanitarian relief, including the delivery of medical supplies (even temperature-sensitive items) as well as environmental monitoring, disaster response, parachute cargo drops, and logistical support to remote communities.
This real-world testbed will serve to validate multiple use cases, generate operational data, and lay the groundwork for scaling humanitarian and development missions across Africa.
That multi-mission capability is already proven. In Antarctica, the British Antarctic Survey used six different pods for scientific work. In Africa, Wright sees roles from resupplying remote mining facilities to anti-poaching patrols. This ‘anything goes’ mentality will be crucial to proving a business case for ULTRA, as making the aircraft work economically means keeping it busy.
“An aircraft sitting on the ground isn’t earning money,” he said. “At this stage of the market, the aircraft needs to fly some cargo in the morning, maybe do surveying in the afternoon, take urgent medicines later, and at night carry some parcels or post. It just needs to be flying the whole time.”
Could the ULTRA cargo drone get even bigger?
The capacity of the ULTRA MKII is decent, but a larger version could carry even more cargo and aid. Scaling up the ULTRA might be an attractive proposition for some, but Wright is cautious.
“Engineers always want to build something a bit bigger and shinier, and my job is to restrain those impulses,” he said with a laugh. “It’s not automatic that bigger is better. Eight aircraft could carry the same as one large one, and be cheaper and more reliable.”
A scaled-up ULTRA would require bigger, more complex powerplants, pushing aside all the benefits of the simple Rotax engines. The whole proposition would become everything the ULTRA is designed not to be – difficult to maintain, more expensive to operate and with higher risk. It’s not somewhere Windracers is keen to explore at this point.
While the aircraft will remain small, it’s not quite small enough. Its size means regulators instinctively want to push it down the path of ‘light aircraft’ in terms of certification. That process is complex and not an attractive proposition for the company right now.
“Clearly, the classic approach in aviation is certification, and there are good reasons for that in manned aviation. But in unmanned, where the risk to life is much lower, it can freeze development,” Wright explained. “It would be a great shame to give up the speed of our development just to chase a certificate that may not even fit the risk profile.”
For now, Windracers will continue to operate the ULTRA on SORA-based approvals and specific authorisations, focusing on proving the platform in permissive environments.
“I set up the company to deliver aid,” Wright said. “Entrepreneurship is about suspending disbelief and ignoring the risks; you have to be a bit unrealistic about how things will happen. But when we finally do fly in Malawi, that will be the proudest moment.”
