Industry News

Natilus expects to conduct flight tests with a full-scale ‘Kona’ in 2024. The Kona is a remotely piloted 85ft blended-wing-body (BWB) aircraft capable of carrying a 4.3 metric ton payload. It’s expected to pave the way for the development of even autonomous cargo aircraft capable of carrying greater payloads. Natilus, which is conducting tests at an airport in the C...

Stork STM is an autonomous aerial logistics vehicle that is capable of beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations carrying payloads weighing 135kg over 400km. The Oxford-based company said that this payload capacity has been chosen as it is an optimum weight to resupply an eight-person section for two days. UASHLC Phase 2 is a joint endeavour between Defence Equipme...

Funded by EPSRC, ATRACT (A Trustworthy Robotic Autonomous system to support Casualty Triage) will see the development of a flying drone that can assist and speed up triage in the critical post-trauma minutes that are crucial to surviving battlefield trauma. The £850,000 project concludes in 2026. In a statement, Ardhendu Behera, Professor of Computer Vision and Artifici...

Pyka is one of a growing number of startups developing uncrewed cargo aircraft with substantially larger payloads and longer ranges than the small drones now being used to deliver medicines and other supplies. Skyports is a launch customer for Pyka’s Pelican Cargo, an autonomous electric aircraft with a 400-lb. payload and range up to 200 mi. Pyka’s Pelican Cargo to fly...

Avionics International covered some updates from the company in a recent issue of our magazine. We spoke with Unifly’s co-founder and CEO, Andres Van Swalm, last May following the news of a €10 million investment from Terra Drone Corporation and Japanese government fund JOIN. Unifly has partnered with ENAIRE, a Spanish ANSP, to develop an automated digital drone manageme...

With its international headquarters in Reading, Altitude Angel has developed UTM (Unified Traffic Management) technology that provides the software and infrastructure required for drones to fly safely, without a pilot, over large distances. The £5m deal with Etc. - the incubation team in BT Group’s Digital unit - will accelerate Altitude Angel’s roll-out of its ARROW te...

Standard delivery, scheduled delivery, pickup … and drone delivery? Most food delivery apps only offer those first three options. But DoorDash (NYSE: DASH) on Monday launched a pilot of on-demand drone delivery in Logan, Australia, with Alphabet (NASDAQ: GOOGL) subsidiary Wing, which has been operating in the Brisbane suburb since 2019. It’s the first time the drone de...

Jeremy Howitt Immediately before lockdown, a team from Snowdonia Aerospace, with partners SwiftFlight Avionics, University of Manchester and the Welsh Ambulance Service, completed a successful flight demo that showed proof-of-concept for beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) delivery of a defibrillator by drone to a remote, rural location that would be difficult to reac...

Penguin C fixed wing UAV equipped with Epsilon 175 EO/MWIR gyro stabilized ISR camera system captured a resupply mission performed by Schiebel Camcopter S-100 UAV during US Army exercise. Video footage is available here. During the mission, Boeing demonstrated Camcopter S-100 was resupplying US Army soldiers with battlefield cargo. This was the first time when autonom...

Octopus ISR Systems, a division of UAV Factory Ltd., announced that it has released a new feature for precision geo-pointing for its miniature Epsilon series of gyro-stabilized gimbals. This feature, Precision Geo-Lock, combines a state-of-the-art GPS-aided inertial navigation system (GPS/INS) with dedicated software algorithms and payload operator software. Precision Ge...

National Armed Forces will acquire unmanned aerial vehicles based on the agreement signed between the Ministry of Defense and the high technology company UAV FACTORY. “Cooperation with local manufacturers of unmanned aerial vehicles is crucial for national defense capability development. The key criteria in the selection of unmanned aerial vehicle suppliers was supply...

Starting on Monday (18 September 2023) the NATO-led exercise Dynamic Messenger 23 focuses on integrating Maritime Unmanned Systems into operations, including personnel, training and readiness issues. Dynamic Messenger 23 gathers more than 2000 civilian and military personnel on shore and on board ships as part of the exercise. Fourteen NATO Allies, including the host nat...

These trials, which saw participation from the Chief of the Army Artillery Center, along with the Directors of Equipment, Training, and Material and Equipment, are part of an ongoing assessment regarding the potential use of the Alpha A900 UAVs by the Indonesian Coast Guard to monitor maritime sectors and identify anomalies within Indonesian territorial waters. This alig...

During the past few years our platforms have mainly evolved in two lines: reliability and versatility. To accomplish this, we have invested significant time and engineering effort on the following lines: Increased reliability and reduced maintenance of gearbox and main rotor and tail rotor bearings. Heavy fuel conversion: this has been one of the most challenging aspect...

Their first product is the ElevonX SkyEye modular UAV system, which they have been developing for the last five years and brought to serial production in 2019. The modularity of the system allows the aircraft to be easily upgraded from the flying wing shape to the A-Tail version and to the VTOL aircraft. The modularity of the system does not end there, as the aircraft...