Autonomous aircraft for GPS-denied environments. Sensing, navigation and mission autonomy, built in Scotland.
The scan line moves up Glen Coe as you scroll. Behind it, the hillside turns into measured heights.
This is the glen as survey data, with its summits named. Move across it to read a grid reference and a height.
SIDRA builds autonomous aircraft for public agencies, researchers and industry. They fly where GPS fails and are held to aviation-grade standards. The platform that watches a forest also inspects a turbine: one autonomy stack, many missions.
The aircraft flies on its own estimate through denied navigation, geolocates what matters, and returns. The work begins where certainty ends.
One autonomy core, CUSTOS, flies every airframe, and every mission gets an airframe tuned to its envelope. A buildable quadcopter today, a hybrid VTOL in development, a long-endurance concept next.
Buildable today: ~£610 bill of materials, 40-minute hover, flying the CUSTOS autonomy stack on commercial hardware.
Bullet fuselage, blended wing, four lift rotors and a pusher: vertical launch anywhere, fixed-wing range once airborne. Carries the ASTRUM SPAD low-light array for after-dark sector sweeps.
The watchtower of the fleet: an extended-range sensor platform for wide-area environmental survey, carbon verification and flood-corridor mapping.
Low-noise rotors and high-AGL optics for standoff orbits animals never notice.
Precision station-keeping against turbine blades and solar rows, macro imaging in ground-effect turbulence.
Salt-spray hardened BVLOS transit and structured survey where crewed flights stay grounded.
Low-tide repeat survey over mangrove restoration plots, multispectral scoring that steers the next seeding season.
The exact airframe from the engineering model, wheelbase to fastener. Drag to orbit.
Autonomy core for uncrewed platforms. Edge perception, on-board reasoning, and resilient flight across degraded and denied links. The guardian process every airframe runs.
Command and control layer. Fleet tasking, telemetry aggregation, and human-on-the-loop authority from a single ground station: one operator, many aircraft.
Clean-propulsion architecture for aerospace and maritime. Hybrid-electric and zero-emission drive engineered for endurance over noise.
Sensing layer. Multi-spectral Earth observation built around SPAD arrays with in-house calibration pipelines, tuned for low-light edge inference: photon-starved scenes read on board, at dusk, in smoke.
Every mission gets the aircraft it needs.
One autonomy core, CUSTOS, flies the whole fleet. Each mission is served by an airframe tuned to its envelope. The orbit that refines a wildfire fix also inspects a turbine blade. The platform differs. The discipline does not.
Dawn and dusk patrol lines over high-risk forestry, reading the ground in thermal. A smouldering ignition is geolocated and reported minutes after it starts, while it is still one crew rather than a thousand hectares. 2025 gave the UK its largest recorded wildfire. 2026 gave Scotland a national action plan.
A thermal sweep of a corrie takes minutes rather than a rope team’s afternoon, and the sorties that matter most start after dark. Vertical launch from the rescue base, fixed-wing transit to the sector, and a navigation stack that holds its own estimate in the glens where GNSS gets marginal.
The watchtower of the fleet. Long-endurance repeat lines over restored blanket bog measure re-wetting and vegetation recovery for carbon verification; when the water rises, the same aircraft flies BVLOS river corridors and maps flood extents while responders still have hours to act.
High, quiet standoff orbits count herds, log movement corridors, and flag vehicles that should not be there, without a rotor note the animals ever notice.
The same orbit logic that refines a track flies a blade-following scan: leading-edge erosion and lightning strikes geotagged to the exact blade station. Over solar arrays, thermal passes find hot cells and failed strings before they show in the yield curve. No rope team, no wasted shutdown window.
BVLOS transit to platforms and substations, structured survey in salt spray that grounds crewed flights, on a navigation stack that holds its estimate when GNSS degrades.
The Gulf is planting mangroves by the hundred million. Abu Dhabi alone targets 100M by 2030, seeded by drone, and someone has to measure what survives. Repeat low-tide surveys score germination and survival, feeding the next seeding pass.
2026 was Scotland’s worst fire season on record. Eleven thousand hectares went at Carrbridge and Dava, the Cairngorms National Park was evacuated as fire spread north through forestry, and Arthur’s Seat burned in the heart of Edinburgh. Across the continent that July, Spain, Portugal, France, Greece, Italy and Türkiye burned through the third heatwave in six weeks. The scars on this board are that record, each one carrying its date. The thermal markers are whatever is open today. What sits between them has not moved: detection still depends on watchtowers, passers-by and satellites that revisit hours apart, and the gap between ignition and alert is where a one-crew fire becomes a thousand-hectare one. It is the gap NIGHTJAR patrols.
A free-burning fire grows with the SQUARE of the time it is left alone. Answer in forty seconds and it is a square metre of ground. Answer when the next satellite pass has been processed and it is 72,900 times the fire.
NIGHTJARIgnition to alert in the engineering simulator, patrolling the ground it is over.
SATELLITENASA FIRMS publishes near-real-time detections about three hours after the satellite overpass that saw them.
exci 60 s · Dryad 3 min · IQ FireWatch 6 min · Türkiye OGM 11 min Between the two sit the systems already in service, in this order: exci camera AI on a slope, Dryad sensor mesh with its own drone, IQ FireWatch towers, and Türkiye's national forestry drone programme. Vendor and operator figures, not ours. They are the comparison a buyer actually makes, and the reason the honest claim here is minutes saved on the field, not hours saved on a satellite.
Elliptical spread at 3 m/min, length-to-breadth 3:1. A model, not a measurement: real fires meet rivers, roads, rain and crews.
NIGHTJAR’s target: ignition to geolocated alert in under 90 seconds, on autonomous dawn and dusk patrol.
Watch it find the fire ↓Everything here is about the minutes between ignition and alert, and most of those minutes are spent driving to a trailhead. CAIRN is a sealed nest that sits on the hill through the winter and launches on a trigger.
CAIRN is a concept study. Nothing here has been built or flown, and the model is a procedural sketch of the sequence rather than a render of hardware.
Open the nest →Building SIDRA's NIGHTJAR airframe and CUSTOS autonomy stack, validated in 6-DOF simulation in-house.
Background in UAV performance engineering at Baykar Technologies, followed by managing the Baykar–SAMI–Saudi Ministry of Defense partnership for localized Bayraktar Akıncı and TB2 production in Saudi Arabia, Turkiye's largest defense export partnership.
Research at Edinburgh's APRIL AI Hub (STMicroelectronics × Google DeepMind × Royal Academy of Engineering), Bristol Drone Soc., UCL's Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, and Airbus UK.
Member, Royal Aeronautical Society & IMechE. Trilingual (Arabic, English, Turkish), Scout leader, building in the UK.
Outside SIDRA: nature enthusiast and parrot owner, drawn to wildlife and conservation, part of why environmental applications matter to what SIDRA builds. The instinct started with a free-flying sun conure on the Red Sea that would maneuver over the water and return to hand: loiter, maneuver, return, before any of it was code.
Recruiting technical leads across the capability pillars.
SIDRA is an early-stage venture out of Glasgow, taking one autonomy core, CUSTOS, from validated flight test toward operational deployment across wildfire early warning, inspection and environmental missions. We are in conversation with investors and partners who back frontier hardware and climate resilience.
The scroll above is the argument. These are the records behind it: the airframes one by one, the stack that flies them, the nest, the ground they work over, and the engineering log as it is written.
