![]() Another firm, Texas-based Skyways, handed over its own prototype cargo UAS last fall. The contract calls for PteroDynamics to deliver three VTOL prototypes for the Navy’s Blue Water Maritime Logistics UAS program by June 2022. “That’s when we began this conversation and made the agreement we signed with them in June of this year,” Graczyk says. In April 2019, NAWCAD approached the company with a view to evaluating Transwing. “They were finding winds a particular problem with the other vehicles they were evaluating and they found our design had the prospect of delivering superior ability to handle gust situations.” Still, the Navy wasn’t getting exactly what it was looking for according to PteroDynamics CEO Matthew Graczyk. Participants were required to prove their aircraft could autonomously transport a 20-pound payload to a moving ship 25 miles away without refueling.Īpproximately 65 potential UAS cargo carriers were analyzed but only two met requirements. PteroDynamicsĪ call was issued to industry for the capabilities NAWCAD was looking for in small cargo-hauling UAS and the Navy put drones through an evaluation during the 2019 Advanced Naval Technology Exercise. “We want to develop a logistics system to get rid of the helos that transport parts back and forth,” Tony Schmidt, director of rapid prototyping, experimentation and demonstration at the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division (NAWCAD) told USNI News.Ī schematic representation of Transwing's VTOL to cruise flight transition from the company's U.S. Small to midsized UAS, the Navy realized, might be able to do most VERTREP missions in just as timely but far less expensive fashion. That doesn’t seem an efficient use of large, fuel-hungry, multimillion-dollar, multi-mission aircraft. The analysis confirmed what many in the Navy long knew: Some 90% of critical repair cargo delivered at sea by helicopters and V-22 aircraft weighs less than 50 pounds. ![]() The practice has long been known as “vertical replenishment,” or VERTREP, and a long line of VTOL aircraft up to today’s SH-60 Seahawk and V-22 Osprey have spent countless hours and countless pounds of fuel shuttling priority cargo between ships. Since the advent of the helicopter the Navy has airlifted time-critical supplies, gear and even personnel between at-sea ships via aircraft. In 2018 Military Sealift Command and Navy Fleet Forces Command did an analysis of the typical resupply operations naval formations do at sea. ![]()
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