Drone technology from UASFeed — autonomy, swarming, sensors, counter-jamming, FPV builds, and the engineering underneath uncrewed flight.
Joe Manor's engineless Endgame 130 glider read 474 mph on a radar gun at Parker Mountain, then hit the hillside. The flight was a shakedown of the first airframe from new molds, and it shows how dynamic soaring takes energy from a ridge's wind shear.
Read the story →L3Harris has a contract worth up to $60M to flight-test a fully integrated ramjet interceptor for the Army's XRC counter-drone effort. Northrop Grumman is building its own XRC ramjet motor, and neither company has said how far, how fast or at what cost.
Auterion's Nemyx VLS puts an electric elevator in each launch tube, claims 30% more drones per volume, and accepts FPVs, interceptors and loitering munitions from Skyfall, Rheinmetall, DeltaQuad, Griffon and others. A human picks the target and Nemyx automates the launch.
BAE Systems unveiled a modular high-power microwave array for defeating drone swarms, paired with its MDACS cannon, but the maturity claims differ by source: TRL 6 in the company's account, ready for operational testing in a theater command per Defense Daily.
Maker Joshua Bird has a 3D-printed drone hovering and steering on one motor, using a 45-degree hinged propeller, a motor that speeds up and slows 300 times a second, and rewritten controller firmware. So far it only flies in his bedroom, the design files are on GitHub, and HKU's 2023 PULSAR did single-motor flight first.
Quantum Systems says its battery-electric Apex Recordhunter flew one 777 km/h run on Oct. 19. That is faster than Russia's jet-powered Geran drones, but it is not an official record yet, because a valid record needs a return run in the opposite direction.
Firefly's Elytra spacecraft has passed preliminary design review for NASA/JPL's MoonFall, a $75M effort to drop four rocket-powered hopping drones about 50 km above the lunar south pole no earlier than 2028. The design is settled on paper, but the critical design review, a launch vehicle and the drones themselves are all still to come.
SpaceX cut Russia off from Starlink in February. Russia now steers long-range jet drones onto Kyiv targets by passing the control link through Chinese mesh radios, a relay drone circling overhead and, a Ukrainian adviser believes, relay nodes inside the city.
Australia has declassified three payloads for Anduril's Ghost Shark: up to 12 sea mines per mission, supply caches for special forces, and swarms of Altius aerial drones. Defence Industry Minister Pat Conroy says the uncrewed submarines "now have teeth."
SkyFall's StarGate, a six-rotor drone with a stretcher cabin that the company says carries 330 lb, has gone to a Ukrainian assault regiment for front-line evaluation. The unit says a month of flying will be needed before anyone knows whether it works.
Skydio's new ISR Command lets one operator fly two X10D drones and push MISB-encoded target coordinates to strike platforms like the F-16, while L3Harris adds Falcon IV radios and the Wraith waveform. The claims come from the vendors and still need Army testing.
The FCC will vote Oct. 29 on a draft order that would let drones use 50 MHz of licensed, nationwide 800 MHz cellular spectrum by carving uncrewed aircraft out of a rule that dates to the airplane-phone era. The ban on passengers using phones in flight stays.
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