C-UAS
Grant Jordan and his co-founders are announcing the public launch of SkySafe, a drone protection startup that wants to help facilities secure critical airspace. After graduating from MIT with a degree in computer science, Jordan spent four years at the United States Air Force acquiring a particular set of
Business
PrecisionHawk Inc. -- a provider of aerial data and safety platforms for drones -- announced that it has closed an $18 million round of funding with Verizon Ventures, a subsidiary of USAA, NTT Docomo Ventures, and Yamaha Motor with full participation from existing investors Intel Capital, Millennium Technology Value Partners and Indiana
Testing
The US Air Force’s next-generation multispectral camera, the UTC Aerospace Systems (UTAS) MS-177, has been successfully flown on the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems "Predator C" Avenger aircraft. The semi-stealthy, unmanned hunter-killer aircraft has been under development by General Atomics in Poway, California since
Military
Soldiers launch an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) carrying communication relay system during a training exercise. A communications regiment with the PLA Western Theater Command stationed in Chengdu, southwest China’s Sichuan Province, recently carried out a UAV flight training exercise in the west of Sichuan Province. Source: China Military
Testing
Aurora Flight Sciences announced that a subscale vehicle demonstrator (SVD) of its LightningStrike, Vertical Take-off and Landing Experimental Plane (VTOL x-plane) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) was successfully flown at a U.S. military facility. The flight of the subscale aircraft met an important DARPA
Accidents
A lack of regulation has been blamed for a drone hitting a British Airways passenger jet, as it emerged that police have failed to investigate 40 near-misses in the past year. Calls for action to mitigate the threat to passenger aircraft from unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) came from Europe’
HMS Protector has been trialling small drones to help her negotiate the Antarctic ice for the first time. The survey ship, which has just completed her third stint around the frozen continent this austral summer, has launched both a tiny quadcopter and a 3D-printed aircraft equipped with cameras. A
Business
Turkey’s procurement agency has launched a competition promoting domestic development of key sub-systems used in drones. The Undersecretariat for Defense Industries (SSM) said some of the systems it wants to develop domestically include turboprop engines, spare cruise systems, perceive-and-avoid systems, wide band satellite communication systems, automatic
Military
The U.S. Air Force is developing new computer algorithms to allow fighter pilots to control armed drones from inside their own cockpits. The goal of the so-called “Loyal Wingman” initiative is to pair up manned, fifth-generation stealth fighters with unmanned versions of older jets — in order to
Military
The Australian Navy put the word out a request for tender for a rotary wing UAS with a strong focus on ISR. Whilst the tender closed on April 11, it’s still worth looking at who’s in the mix. The two most likely contenders in this market are the
Commercial
At the end of March 2016 at Fogo Island in Canada, Schiebel’s CAMCOPTER S-100 Unmanned Air System (UAS) successfully demonstrated its capabilities to a host of dignitaries from the Canadian Coast Guard, the Royal Canadian Navy, Transport Canada, the Canadian National Research Council and the University of Alaska
Accidents
A police investigation is under way after a passenger plane approaching Heathrow Airport was hit by what is believed to have been a drone. The British Airways flight from Geneva, with 132 passengers and five crew on board, was hit as it approached the London airport at 12:50 BST