- The US Navy is looking into using drones to deliver critical repair cargo to broken warships.
- The BlueWater Maritime Logistics UAS project seeks innovative VTOL designs.
- The unique PteroDynamics Transwing design recently received a $4.65 million contract expansion.
The US Navy wants to know if roughly motorcycle-sized drones can do what its larger piloted workhorse helicopter and tiltrotor aircraft are currently doing — flying critical repair cargo out to broken warships.
Critical repair parts for incapacitated warships, such as circuit boards, o-rings, or pumps, around half the time weigh less than a pound. The current delivery approach wastes fuel and other resources and puts a lot of unnecessary wear and tear on Military Sealift Command’s H-60 and V-22 aircraft.
No one really needs a heavy, crewed aircraft for this. There just isn’t a proven alternative, at least not yet.
Solving that problem — the primary focus of the Navy’s BlueWater Maritime Logistics UAS project — is a major opportunity for defense tech firms like Colorado-based PteroDynamics Inc.
“Something is valuable. It needs to get somewhere that is hard to get to. It has to get there quickly. It’s time-sensitive. And people are paying a lot of money today to do that mission,” PteroDynamics CEO Matthew Graczyk, told Business Insider.
The company recently picked up a $4.65 million contract expansion from the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division for the development of its novel Transwing aircraft design, bringing the total contract value to over $7 million. The new funding will support development of a new Transwing model, the XP-5.
Multiple companies have contributed BlueWater UAS ideas, many of which are variations of classic designs. The Transwing, as an articulating- or “cracking-wing” design, is unique.
It’s a “very interesting design,” the BlueWater project lead, Bill Macchione, told BI, explaining that the aim as the Navy evaluates uncrewed vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) designs is to find innovations with reduced complexity both in the engineering and employment.
“That is what was very interesting about the PteroDynamics design being an articulating wing,” he said. It’s a “simple linear actuator that basically just articulates the wings on a pivot, and those pushers, those traditional propellers in fixed wing, become the lift propellers in VTOL mode.”
‘That’s where disruption happens’
The first VTOL aircraft designs were early helicopters. Then came designs like lift jets, tail-sitter aircraft, and tilt rotors. PteroDynamics has now patented a new design that leverages the propellers in all flight modes and can fold the wings around the fuselage.
Its wings stretch out in the cruise phase of flight and fold back during vertical flight to a configuration resembling a quadcopter during take-off and landing.
Graczyk calls the Transwing design “VTOL 3.0.”
The unique design came from Val Petrov, a mathematician, chemist, and expert in nonlinear dynamics who spent years in asset and capital management. He wasn’t an aviation engineer, but he was, as Graczyk told BI, a “tinkerer.”
“When you ask someone who is educated in a field, who has worked in a field, how to solve a problem, they go into how they’ve been taught to solve the problem,” Graczyk said, and you ultimately end up with a variation of an existing design.
“When you ask a guy who has not been taught how to solve the problem, that’s where innovation lives,” he said, telling BI that is the key to making something new. “That’s where disruption happens. That is how Petrov was able to conceive of this Transwing that didn’t come from Airbus or Lockheed or Raytheon or Boeing.”
Petrov is PteroDynamics’ founder and chairman of its board.
Whether the PteroDynamics design is what the Navy ultimately needs remains to be seen, but the service is interested.
Some of the other uncrewed aircraft designs being looked at and tested by the Navy as part of the BlueWater program include Skyways V2.6, ShieldAI’s V-BAT, and Sierra Nevada Corporation’s Voly-50, among others featuring their own innovations.
‘The world is changing’
The Navy’s BlueWater UAS technology development program started years ago, evolving from a 2018 study that found about 48% of all critical repair cargo being flown out to ships by Military Sealift Command aircraft is under 16 ounces, smaller than a regular water bottle. The study found that 76% of all parts are under 10 pounds, and 90% are under 50 pounds.
The Navy is interested in determining whether VTOL drones weighing under 330 pounds can run these delivery missions instead of crewed aircraft.
The drones have to be able to fly 400 nautical miles round trip, perhaps eventually 1,000 miles, on a mixture of electricity and JP-5 fuel with a 50-pound payload stored internally and land on the deck of a moving ship at sea without any support infrastructure and minimal sailor involvement.
Using small drones points to big cost savings. Each Sikorsky SH-60/MH-60 Seahawk costs over $30 million and requires two fully trained and proficient human pilots. That is not even factoring in the operational and sustainment costs.
In the drones, there also has to be a certain degree of autonomy.
This is “not the kind of thing where somebody is sitting with a controller in their hand and controlling the aircraft,” Graczyk said of the Transwing. “You lay out your mission on a computer, so just one laptop, an operator, and an aircraft, that’s all you need, and you communicate the mission to the aircraft. You push go, and it takes off, does the mission, and lands. You don’t have to be involved anymore.”
“To a certain extent, it can make decisions on its own,” he said.
Getting a drone to fly that mission is nothing like Amazon drone deliveries. Amazon doesn’t have to worry about adversaries trying to shoot them down or jam their communications. And there is also no need to land it on a moving target in an unforgiving delivery environment.
“Landing on ships and working around ships is not easy,” John Bruening, the director of MSC’s Taluga Group, told BI.
Meeting the tough operational expectations of the Navy’s BlueWater technology development program is a complex technological challenge that the Navy has been working with a range of companies to overcome. The project is not yet a program of record and is experimental for now. Still, this is clearly where military technology is heading.
“The world is changing,” Graczyk said. “We’re seeing geopolitics changing, we’re seeing the way warfare is conducted changing, and the way diplomacy is conducted, all of that’s changing. There is a particular shift in bias toward higher volume, lower cost autonomous systems that are attritable, that are expendable.”
There are tremendous possibilities and “an evolutionary introduction into the market” is the key, he said. “We’re trying to use this revolutionary technology to solve problems that exist today.”
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