Recently in Unmanned Category

The Office of Naval Research's Flexrotor vertical takeoff and landing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is entering the next phase of its development, the US Navy announced 30 April.

The USN has awarded Aerovel Corp a contract to improve the Flexrotor's capabilities with a new propulsion system to help the aircraft better transition from vertical to cruising flight.

The small UAV features an oversized propeller which acts like a helicopter's rotors for vertical takeoff and landing, but it also has wings for conventional flight.
The Flexrotor first demonstrated such a transition in August 2011.

The UAV could eventually be used for special operations missions. "[The special ops personnel] like the idea of not exposing where they are when they need to launch and recover one," says John Kinzer, ONR program officer for Air Vehicle Technology. "They could put it on a mountaintop somewhere and just leave it to do surveillance."

The service says there are also potential applications to Arctic surveillance and weather reporting for the Navy and other organizations, such as National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Evening minions, I'm off to Phoenix, Arizona, in the morning to cover my first civilian story. There will be flying involved--I'll report back if anything interesting should happen...

 

In the meantime here is a link to my MQ-8C story- or just read the Cliff's Notes version below.

 

Northrop Grumman is porting over the guts of its MQ-8B Firescout unmanned helicopter to a Bell 407 airframe--creating the MQ-8C. The US Navy awarded the contract $262.3 million today to buy two developmental airframes and six production examples for its special operations forces. The Bell machine is about twice the size of the Schweizer 333 on which the MQ-8B is based...

This Fire-X prototype, which evolved into the MQ-8C, started off life as a prototype for the ill-fated US Army ARH-70 Arapaho armed aerial scout helicopter.

Second time lucky I guess.

Lockheed Martin's modified optionally-manned Kaman K-MAX is doing well in US Marine Corps user trials in Afghanistan. While the USMC is probably onboard, what about the US Army? They could certainly use something like this. But do they have the money and the interest? That is the question... Meanwhile, NATO countries are apparently lining up to buy it according to Lockheed's Jim Naylor. Read about it here.

... a site like this starts up: https://uavjobs.com/

(Note: it appears no UAV jobs are actually on the site, but I'm sure that's only a matter of time.)