Skydio CEO Joins Ramapo Police DFR Demo for Rockland Chiefs

The Town of Ramapo Police Department in Rockland County, New York, hosted all five county town supervisors this week for a live demonstration of its Drone as First Responder program. Skydio CEO Adam Bry attended in person and helped sponsor the event, alongside former NYPD brass and other law enforcement figures, as Monsey Scoop reported.

Real-time drone footage streamed to a large screen as Ramapo Police Chief Danny Hyman walked officials through how the program is reshaping emergency response across the town.

What Happened at the Demonstration

Hyman presented the department’s DFR program as a working case study for the other four supervisors in Rockland County. Ramapo is currently the only agency in the county with an FAA-approved DFR initiative, a detail the department has emphasized since the program launched in early 2025.

The live demonstration streamed drone video to attendees while Hyman explained how the platform gets eyes on scenes before ground units arrive. Ramapo Police have previously stated that drones can reach incident locations in as little as 20 seconds under the right conditions, operating 24 hours a day from autonomous docks.

The department flies under a beyond visual line of sight waiver from the FAA, which allows remote pilots to launch from anywhere the cellular network reaches.

Also on hand were John Chell, Tarik Sheppard, and Devin Ross, all FBI National Academy graduates. Chell previously served as NYPD Chief of Department, and Sheppard served as NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information.

Both were involved in scaling the NYPD’s own DFR program, which is one of the largest municipal DFR deployments in the country and also runs on Skydio hardware.

The Skydio X10 Platform in Focus

The meeting centered on the Skydio X10, the platform Ramapo Police have adopted as part of the expanded DFR rollout. The aircraft folds down to under 4.7 pounds and deploys in under 40 seconds, with a top speed around 45 mph and a flight time of roughly 40 minutes per battery.

The sensor package is the real selling point for public safety. The VT300-Z option combines a 50 MP wide camera, a 64 MP narrow camera, and a 48 MP telephoto zoom capable of roughly 128x system zoom. Skydio states operators can detect a person at 8,200 feet or a vehicle at 7.5 miles with that telephoto sensor.

A Teledyne FLIR Boson+ thermal camera with 640 by 512 resolution rounds out the kit and supports search and rescue work in darkness, fog, or smoke.

X10 also ships with Skydio’s NightSense zero-light autonomous flight system, IP55 protection against dust and water, six 32 MP navigation cameras for 360-degree obstacle avoidance, and a 5G cellular link that extends range anywhere there’s coverage. GPS, GLONASS, Galileo, and BeiDou satellite support round out the positioning stack. AES-256 encryption protects the video feed.

Why Adam Bry’s Presence Matters

Skydio CEO Adam Bry flying out for a five-supervisor meeting in Rockland County is not routine. It tells you where Skydio sees its growth runway. Mid-size municipal DFR deployments are the commercial beachhead that lets the company prove out the X10 in live public safety environments and build reference customers for every neighboring department that walks through the door.

Ramapo also matters for another reason. The department started its DFR program in late 2024 with Paladin Drone Base Stations and has now clearly shifted or expanded onto the Skydio X10 dock ecosystem. That procurement signal is exactly the kind of proof point Skydio needs as more American agencies weigh alternatives to DJI hardware under federal restrictions.

The Chell and Sheppard appearances add NYPD credibility to the room. Both helped shepherd the NYPD’s DFR expansion, and their presence functions as an informal endorsement for the smaller departments now evaluating similar investments.

DroneXL’s Take

Here’s what I find genuinely significant about this meeting. A small-town police department in New York just hosted the CEO of Skydio and a pair of former NYPD chiefs to show four neighboring supervisors how its DFR program works. That is not a procurement pitch. That is a playbook being handed off in real time.

American-made hardware matters more than it used to for agencies navigating federal drone restrictions, and Skydio has positioned the X10 as the default answer for departments that want autonomy software paired with a clean supply chain. The X10 is not cheap, and at equivalent price points DJI still builds sharper hardware. That is not an opinion, that is what the spec sheets show. What Skydio sells is the software stack, the dock ecosystem, and a regulatory story that holds up when a federal grant application lands on a city manager’s desk.

For a department like Ramapo Police, which serves a dense suburban population north of New York City, the X10’s fast deployment time, 128x zoom, and FLIR thermal suite are genuine operational advantages.

The fact that Adam Bry showed up in person to watch it fly tells me Skydio knows exactly how valuable these regional demonstrations are. Every neighboring supervisor who saw that drone launch in 20 seconds is a future purchase order.

Photo credit: Ramapo Police FB