News, deep dives, and analysis — every VTOL story, newest first.
The U.S. Navy has selected Insitu to continue providing intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance services to the Navy, Marine Corps, and other federal customers, as Sea Power Magazine reported. The award covers both the ScanEagle and Integrator platforms under a Contractor-Owned, Contractor-Operated model, which puts Insitu’s own aircraft and operators on the mission rather than handing…
A Chinese research team has flown what it calls the world’s first fixed-wing drone built largely from bamboo. The tilt-rotor UAV took off from a field in Tianjin, climbed, transitioned to forward flight, and came back down on its own rotors, as reported by China Daily. More than a quarter of its airframe is made…
Joby Aviation completed New York City’s first point-to-point electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) air taxi demonstration flights this past weekend, the company announced this morning. The aircraft, tail number N545JX, departed John F. Kennedy International Airport (JFK) and landed across Manhattan’s existing heliport network. Joby is calling the campaign ‘week-long’ in its release headlin
Terrahaptix Inc., the Nigerian defense-tech startup also known as Terra Industries, will open a 34,000-square-foot drone factory in Accra, Ghana, by the end of June 2026. At full capacity, the plant targets 50,000 units annually by 2028, which would make it the largest drone manufacturing site on the African continent, the company confirmed in a…
A Tokyo defense startup just put a $450 fixed-wing drone on the Japanese market, and the airframe is made of wood. JISDA, short for Japan Integrated Security Design Agency, announced the ACM-01 Shiraha on April 14 in Tokyo. It’s a 6.2-foot wingspan trainer built to be flown hard, crashed, and replaced without anyone wincing at…
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…
Honeywell Aerospace and California-based Odys Aviation have announced a collaboration to mount Honeywell’s SAMURAI counter-drone system on the Laila, a hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft built for long-range, runway-independent operations, as reported by UAS Weekly. The combined platform is designed to hunt hostile drones from the air before they reach critical infrastructure. What SAMURAI Actually Doe
Two Harvard mechanical engineering seniors have built a fixed-wing VTOL (vertical takeoff and landing) drone from scratch to help marine biologists locate sperm whales tagged with VHF (very high frequency) transmitters off the coast of Dominica, according to a project profile published by Harvard’s John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Kuma McCraw…
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