Mountain Horse Solutions wants U.S. government buyers looking hard at the Talon DT-300 Drone Plus, a fully electric tandem-rotor VTOL that hauls 100 pounds (45 kg) and sits on the Pentagon’s Blue UAS Cleared List. The airframe, designed by British propulsion specialist Rotron Aerospace, has dropped mortar rounds on a Royal Navy ship and fired Javelin missiles at an American proving ground. After years of covering heavy-lift promises, I pay attention when one arrives with receipts.

Two Rotors Lift 100 Pounds on Battery Power

The Talon DT-300 is a battery-powered vertical takeoff and landing aircraft built around two 11.5-foot (3.5 m) counter-rotating rotors mounted in tandem, a helicopter-style layout that needs no tail rotor and lets a 198-pound (90 kg) maximum-takeoff-weight machine carry payloads of up to 100 pounds (45 kg).

Mountain Horse’s product page tells a clear story. Maximum range is 87 miles (140 km) with the aircraft empty, dropping to about 43 miles (70 km) when it carries 66 pounds (30 kg). Endurance runs around two hours with a lighter 22-pound (10 kg) load.

Top speed is 75 mph (120 km/h) with a 50 mph (80 km/h) cruise, and the listed ceiling reaches 20,000 feet (6,000 m). A NextVision Raptor EO/IR gimbal handles the imaging work.

Rotron’s own spec sheet says the bare airframe weighs 68 pounds (31 kg) including camera and datalink, two liquid-cooled 10 kW electric motors drive the rotors, and the carbon composite fuselage folds for transport with tool-free assembly in the field.

Rotron also claims disk loading under 1 pound per square foot (4.6 kg/m2), several times lower than a typical cargo helicopter. That means gentler downwash when lowering supplies to troops or a ship’s deck.

Blue UAS Clearance Opens The Government Door

The Talon DT-300 Drone Plus joined the Defense Innovation Unit’s Blue UAS Cleared List in August 2025, a vetting process that confirms NDAA compliance along with supply chain and cybersecurity standards, and lets U.S. government and defense customers buy the aircraft without the exception waivers that non-cleared drones require.

The Drone Plus name marks the American market variant. Mountain Horse and Rotron packaged the airframe with four U.S.-sourced subsystems: a Silvus StreamCaster SC4200EP MANET radio, a FIRST RF antenna, Hood Tech Vision’s Alticam AC11-5 imaging system and the Invariant Mule payload deployment kit.

“We are thrilled that the Talon DT-300 has been accepted onto the Blue UAS Cleared List,” Mountain Horse president Bill Allen said when the clearance was announced, calling it “the culmination of years of innovation and partnership” with Rotron.

Mountain Horse operates out of Colorado Springs, Colorado, and Union City, Tennessee, and became part of Florida munitions supplier Global Ordnance through a merger. The company supplies the Department of Defense and other federal customers, and lists its catalog on the GSA Advantage procurement platform.

Neither company has published a price for the Drone Plus. Deals in this class close through government contract vehicles, not shopping carts.

The list keeps moving: DroneXL covered the addition of Kraus Hamdani’s K1000ULE last September.

Trials Put Mortars, Missiles And FPV Drones On One Airframe

Rotron has flown the Talon DT-300 through a heavier demonstration schedule than most electric VTOLs ever face, dropping a dozen inert 81mm mortar rounds onto the deck of the Royal Navy experimentation ship XV Patrick Blackett and firing live Javelin and APKWS munitions at an American proving ground.

The mortar demonstration happened at the REPMUS 2024 naval exercise in September 2024, with the ship stationary at sea and the rounds 3D-printed dummies, according to Janes reporting from the exercise. The same trials had the aircraft delivering six FPV drones and dropping supply bags for forward resupply, details Ukrainian outlet Militarnyi resurfaced this week.

The armed demonstrations came earlier. Rotron says the aircraft fired APKWS laser-guided rockets and a Javelin anti-tank missile at a U.S. military proving ground in 2023, striking targets up to 25 miles (40 km) from the ground control station in crosswinds gusting to 18 mph (16 knots).

Rotron CEO Alex Head described the result as “a fully armed, autonomous battlefield asset.” The company also markets a mothership configuration it says can deploy up to sixteen air-launched drones under remote control.

For contested airspace, the aircraft carries inertial and optical navigation alongside GPS, so a jammed satellite signal doesn’t end the mission.

Ondas Now Owns The Company Behind The Airframe

Ondas Holdings completed its purchase of Rotron Aerospace on March 16, 2026, folding the designer of the Talon DT-300 into an American defense group on a buying streak, a deal that keeps Rotron’s UK operations intact while putting the airframe’s roadmap in new hands. Ondas announced the definitive agreement on February 11 and closed five weeks later.

DroneXL readers know Ondas. Oppenheimer’s $400 billion drone market forecast named the company its top drone stock pick in February, and Ondas had already agreed to acquire Israeli counter-drone firm Sentrycs in November.

DroneXL’s Take

Battlefield resupply is where serious drone money is flowing, and the Talon DT-300 shows up with better paperwork than most of its class. When I covered the U.S. Army’s TRV-150 heavy-lift tests at Fort Stewart in February, the driver was the same: militaries want cargo off dangerous roads and onto aircraft nobody has to ride in.

The Blue UAS stamp is the real product here. Plenty of machines can lift 100 pounds. Very few can be bought by a U.S. government customer without waiver paperwork, and that clearance, backed by a Global Ordnance sales operation already wired into federal procurement, is worth more than any single line on the spec sheet.

That spec sheet still deserves a sober read. All-electric propulsion keeps the aircraft simple and cheap to run, but 87 miles empty becomes 43 miles loaded, and the two-hour endurance figure assumes a light 22-pound load. That’s physics, not marketing, and the manufacturers deserve credit for printing it plainly.

The Ondas angle is the one to watch. Rotron designed this airframe, Mountain Horse sells the American variant, and since March 16 Rotron answers to a new owner with its own defense distribution ambitions. Whether the Drone Plus channel continues unchanged is an open question, not a prediction, and neither company has said a public word about it yet.

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