Pyka Pelican 2 Autonomous Crop Spraying Aircraft

Pyka Inc. is an autonomous aircraft company headquartered in Alameda, California, building heavy-lift electric aircraft for agriculture, logistics and defense. Its agricultural business replaces manned crop dusters with pilotless aircraft that cut pilot risk and drift, and it reports operations in the United States, Honduras, Costa Rica, Indonesia and Brazil.

The Pelican 2 is a fully autonomous, all-electric fixed-wing sprayer with a 300 L payload, a 20 m swath and work rates of 105 ha per hour at 10 L/ha. It runs on Pyka's own PYKA.OS autonomy stack, avionics, Pyka.Perception sensing and electric propulsion, uses hot-swappable battery sets and can operate from dirt, gravel or grass strips, including at night. Named customers include SLC Agrícola, Grupo HAME and Dole Foods.

• Large payload: 300 kg or 300 L with a 20 m spray swath.
• Electric propulsion: four motors with 100 kW combined and 90 kWh lithium-ion batteries.
• Flexible booms: hydraulic nozzles or electric rotary atomizers that adjust droplet size in flight.
• Rough-field operations: takes off within 180 m from dirt, gravel or grass runways.
• Hot-swap batteries: five battery sets with a charge cart that powers four sets at once.
• Simple training: integrated interface with two weeks of pilot training included.

• Large sugar cane growers in Tay Ninh or Gia Lai treating thousands of hectares per season with one autonomous aircraft fleet.
• Banana and fruit exporters spraying fungicides on contiguous plantations with lower drift.
• Rubber and plantation groups operating in Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia replacing manned spraying contracts.

• Direct operating costs as low as about USD 1 per hectare.
• High work rate: 105 ha per hour at 10 L/ha or 72 ha per hour at 20 L/ha with five battery sets.
• Application efficiency of 96% versus 88% for turboprop aircraft, based on the US EPA AgDRIFT model.
• Autonomous and night operation removes pilot exposure and widens the spraying window.

Large plantations of bananas, sugar cane and oil palm rely on manned aerial spraying, which faces pilot shortages, safety incidents and drift complaints. Autonomous electric aircraft bridge the gap between small multirotor drones and crop dusters, and Pyka's presence in Indonesia shows interest from Southeast Asian plantation economies.

Founded in 2017 and headquartered in Alameda, California, with a 110,000 sq ft facility producing three aircraft per month. Reports 289,815 ha sprayed and 18,279 autonomous flights. Also builds the DropShip autonomous logistics aircraft for defense and humanitarian airdrop; in October 2026 it launched Guatemala's first autonomous electric crop spraying operation with Grupo HAME.