News, deep dives, and analysis — every VTOL story, newest first.
More than 90 teams are flying the DARPA Lift Challenge at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force through August 9, chasing a 4:1 payload-to-weight ratio for a share of $6.5 million. DARPA's own prize rules cut the top three awards in half if nobody clears 4:1, and the agency still has not resolved what the FCC Covered List means for the parts these American teams built with.
Sikorsky has completed the initial ground and flight test phase of its Nomad 100 tail-sitting drone for DARPA's EVADE program, sending the 18-foot hybrid-electric aircraft to a government facility for a more demanding multirole test campaign.
When Dominion Energy’s grid operators noticed an unexpected power drop at the Colonial Trail West solar farm in Surry County, Virginia this June, they didn’t send a lineman. They sent a drone. Pilot Aaron Colgrove pulled up the mission from Dominion’s D-ROC, the company’s drone remote operations center, told the unit to head to the…
Getting a beyond-visual-line-of-sight waiver from the FAA has long meant waiting years and hiring lawyers. North Dakota just made it take 23 business days. The state’s Vantis network, the first statewide BVLOS system in the country, has turned the biggest bottleneck in commercial drone work into something close to routine. If you fly drones for…
A U.S. drone company just landed its first international defense contract, and it came from a customer that has been thinking hard about how to keep ships supplied across the Pacific. PteroDynamics, a Colorado-based developer of autonomous VTOL aircraft, announced this week that it won a competitive Royal Australian Navy contract to supply P4 Transwing…
Papa Johns is the second major pizza chain to go airborne this year. The brand teamed up with Wing, Alphabet’s drone delivery subsidiary, to launch a pilot program in Indian Trail, North Carolina on May 11, as PMQ Pizza reported. Customers near Sun Valley Commons can now order three Oven Toasted Sandwiches through the Wing…
Another defense tech company has made the call on California. Knightwerx, a tactical drone developer that built its name making compact military UAS, has moved its headquarters from Camarillo to Scottsdale, and it’s already hiring, as Hoodline reported. The move drops the company squarely into the Phoenix metro’s expanding defense manufacturing corridor just as it…
Waiv Robotics, a London-based maritime tech startup, has unveiled a gyro-stabilized platform that enables fully autonomous takeoff and landing of VTOL drones on moving vessels at sea, as reported by The Robot Report. The system works with existing drones without requiring any hardware or software modifications, addressing one of the biggest barriers in maritime drone…
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