101st Airborne launches Aerosonde drone at JRTC

Soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division launched a Textron Systems Aerosonde unmanned aircraft system during a Joint Readiness Training Center rotation at Fort Polk, Louisiana on April 9, 2026, as DVIDS reported.

The deployment puts one of the Army’s leading tactical drone candidates into a realistic combat training environment alongside the service’s most storied light infantry unit.

The U.S. Army released video of the launch through the Defense Visual Information Distribution Service. Soldiers assigned to the Multi-Functional Reconnaissance Company (MFRC), 3rd Mobile Brigade, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), worked alongside defense contractors to prepare and launch the Aerosonde during the exercise.

The Army described the drone’s role as providing continuous aerial surveillance and real-time reconnaissance to support mission planning and tactical operations for ground units.

The Aerosonde platform

The Aerosonde is a family of fixed-wing and VTOL unmanned aircraft systems built by Textron Systems. The platform has logged more than 700,000 flight hours across desert heat and Arctic cold, making it one of the most operationally proven tactical UAS in the world.

The version most relevant to the Army’s current needs is the Aerosonde Mk. 4.8 VTOL UAS, which carries the military designation YRQ-10A. It’s a hybrid quadrotor design that takes off and lands vertically but transitions to fixed-wing flight for endurance.

It can carry up to 45 pounds of payload, has a wingspan of just over 17 feet, reaches a service ceiling of 15,000 feet, and can stay airborne for nearly 15 hours on a single fuel load.

The Aerosonde runs on JP-8 heavy fuel, which is the same fuel the Army uses across its ground and air vehicles. That’s a logistical advantage that matters in the field because it eliminates the need to transport specialty fuel. The entire system can be assembled and launched in under 30 minutes, and it’s portable enough for two soldiers to move.

The platform supports up to six payloads simultaneously from a library of over 40 options. Those include full-motion video cameras for day and night operations, synthetic aperture radar, signals intelligence, communications relay, LiDAR, and electronic warfare packages.

Its Modular Open Systems Approach design means new payloads can be integrated rapidly without redesigning the airframe.

The fixed-wing variants offer even longer endurance. The Mk. 4.7 can fly for over 18 hours and carries up to 32 pounds of payload, while the larger Mk. 4.8 fixed-wing variant pushes endurance past 17 hours with up to 39 pounds of payload capacity. Both use a pneumatic launcher and net recovery system for operations from constrained environments, including shipboard decks.

What the 101st is doing at JRTC

The JRTC rotation at Fort Polk is one of the Army’s premier combat training exercises. It puts brigade-sized units through realistic simulated combat scenarios against a dedicated opposing force, testing everything from tactical decision-making to logistics under pressure.

The 101st Airborne’s 3rd Mobile Brigade has been at Fort Polk since early April 2026. DVIDS imagery and video show the MFRC conducting mission preparation, driving Infantry Squad Vehicles into simulated ground assault convoys under cover of darkness, and entering a 10-day simulated combat training scenario.

The Aerosonde launch fits into that picture as the reconnaissance element feeding real-time intelligence back to ground commanders.

The fact that defense contractors are working alongside soldiers during the launch is notable but not unusual for a system still moving through the Army’s evaluation pipeline. Contractor support during training rotations is standard practice for platforms that haven’t reached full operational fielding.

A platform in procurement limbo

The Aerosonde’s appearance at JRTC comes against a complicated acquisition backdrop. The Army’s Future Tactical Uncrewed Aircraft Systems (FTUAS) program had been the formal pathway to replace the retired RQ-7 Shadow drone, which served as the Army’s workhorse brigade-level ISR platform through Iraq and Afghanistan.

Textron’s Aerosonde Mk. 4.8 HQ and Griffon Aerospace’s Valiant were the two finalists. Both completed MOSA conformance evaluations and flight demonstrations at Redstone Test Center in 2024. The Army took delivery of production-representative Aerosonde prototypes in late 2024 and began developmental testing in March 2025.

Then the program was cancelled. In May 2025, the Army axed FTUAS as part of the broader Army Transformation Initiative, which also cut the MQ-1 Gray Eagle procurement and the M10 Booker tank. The Army said it couldn’t afford to be locked into long-term programs of record while battlefield technology was evolving so quickly.

But the need didn’t go away. The Army still requires a tactical UAS at the brigade level, and it moved to a separate Brigade UAS directed requirement with the goal of beginning procurement in fiscal year 2026.

Both Textron and Griffon were invited to recompete. The Army described this as a faster, more iterative approach using commercial off-the-shelf technology rather than a traditional multi-year development cycle.

The 101st Airborne training with the Aerosonde at JRTC in April 2026 suggests the platform remains a serious contender even after the FTUAS cancellation. Putting a tactical UAS through a full JRTC rotation with an actual brigade combat team is exactly the kind of real-world validation that matters in a competitive procurement.

DroneXL’s Take

No sugarcoating this, the Army’s tactical drone procurement has been a mess for years. The Shadow retired. The FTUAS program spent years in development and then got cancelled. The Gray Eagle got cut.

And through all of it, brigade combat teams have been operating without the organic ISR capability that their commanders have been asking for since long before the FTUAS paperwork started.

What makes this JRTC video significant isn’t the launch itself. It’s what it represents. The 101st Airborne is the Army’s premier air assault division, and when the MFRC puts a tactical UAS into a full-scale training rotation, that’s not a technology demonstration.

That’s operational integration. Soldiers are learning how to plan around real-time drone surveillance, how to coordinate with contractors during field operations, and how to fold UAS capabilities into the fight at the company level.

The Aerosonde has the numbers to back it up. Over 700,000 flight hours, nearly 15 hours of endurance in VTOL configuration, JP-8 fuel compatibility, and a payload flexibility that most Group 3 drones can’t match.

Whether it wins the brigade UAS contract or not, the fact that soldiers at JRTC are training with it right now tells you the Army isn’t waiting for procurement to catch up with the battlefield.

Photo credit: Textron, DVIDS.