Volume 01 | Issue 39 | March 22, 2021
Reliable Robotics Partnership, Horizon eVTOL Jet, MQ-25 Future Upgrades

Welcome back to the Future of Aerospace, where each week we dive into a few of the trends rapidly defining the next generation of aircraft and aerial markets.

NASA has struck an agreement with SpaceX that the agency hopes will prevent collisions involving its Low-Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft, the International Space Station (ISS) and SpaceX Starlink satellites.The agreement, which NASA published last week, acknowledged the need for a “special” agreement beyond standard practice between NASA and SpaceX due to the sheer size of the Starlink LEO constellation. Starlink currently comprises more than 1,000 satellites. More on that here.

Airlines have started using new mobile applications as digital health passports to prove negative COVID-19 results for passengers traveling internationally. One of the first flights to trial a new digital passport embedded with vaccination information and test results took off Thursday morning on a Qatar Airways flight from Doha to Istanbul, while the International Air Transport Association's (IATA) Travel Pass was also used for the first time last week. Check out coverage of new air traveler digital passports by NBC News here.

THIS WEEK: Reliable Robotics, coming off its groundbreaking flight demonstration of a remotely piloted modified Cessna 208 Caravan last month, is partnering with Switzerland-based startup Daedalean to disrupt the concept of automated navigation and situational awareness technology inside next generation fixed and rotary-wing aircraft. (Autonomy & AI)

Horizon Aircraft thinks they’ve found the solution for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs): make them fly like traditional aircraft. Where many companies are working on creating completely new designs for the air taxi market, Horizon Aircraft is creating an aircraft that flies 98 percent of its missions just like a normal aircraft, Brandon Robinson, CEO of Horizon Aircraft told Aviation Today.
(Electrification and Sustainability)

A Navy official on March 18 said the service sees the MQ-25A Stingray unmanned carrier-based tanker possibly eventually adding strike missions and that up to 40 percent of the future air wing could be unmanned.  (UAS Integration)





Thanks for reading.

— The Future of Aerospace Team
Reliable Robotics Partners with Daedalean to Disrupt Next Generation of Aircraft Navigation and Situational Awareness Systems
Image: Reliable Robotics

Reliable Robotics, coming off its groundbreaking flight demonstration of a remotely piloted modified Cessna 208 Caravan last month, is partnering with Switzerland-based startup Daedalean to disrupt the concept of automated navigation and situational awareness technology inside next generation fixed and rotary-wing aircraft.

Daedalean CEO Luuk van Dijk and Reliable Robotics CEO Robert Rose, co-founder and CEO of Reliable Robotics, both former SpaceX engineers, provided emailed statements to Aviation Today about the March 22 reveal of their new partnership.

What will the Daedalean Partnership with Reliable Robotics Develop?
  • Daedalean CEO Luuk van Dijk: "The end product both companies foresee is a system that can operate in airspaces as a model citizen, that enables denser economic use of the airspace, at safety levels that are an order of magnitude above today's standards."

  • Daedalean has developed machine learning applications based on comprehensive situational awareness that meet and aviation safety level standards defined by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). Their work with EASA examining high performance machine learning algorithms for safety-critical applications resulted in the joint publishing of Concepts of Design Assurance for Neural Networks.

  • Now, Daedalean's advancements in machine learning algorithms and Reliable Robotics' autonomous aircraft system development will be paired to build advanced navigation and situational awareness systems for commercial aircraft operations.

  • van Dijk: “We take high-resolution video input from which we extract in real-time the most possible detail before sending it through a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) tuned for the task at hand.  We have demonstrated subsystems that can navigate, perform guidance to runways and safe emergency landing spots, and traffic detection."

  • Through the new partnership, Daedalean’s systems can now feed this information about the aircraft position relative to the terrain with its obstacles and safe landing sites and relative to other traffic, to the Reliable Robotics flight control stack, which then can use that information to deal with a variety of challenging tasks pilots can encounter, such as jammed or disabled GPS, non-cooperative traffic, or emergency landing scenarios.
Rose, the CEO and co-founder of Reliable Robotics, said that the company's remote pilot control center was designed by engineers who had worked on SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Dragon 2 programs.

Rose: "Our automated flight, communication and control center systems enable remote operation of any type of aircraft. We continue to make steady progress towards certification of these systems for routine commercial use and look forward through this partnership with Daedalean to expand the capabilities of our systems onto additional aircraft type and new types operations, such as eVTOL."

Read the full story here.
How Horizon Aircraft Plans to Join the eVTOL Market with a Mostly Traditional Aircraft
Image: Horizon Aircraft

Horizon Aircraft thinks they’ve found the solution for electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft (eVTOLs): make them fly like traditional aircraft.

Where many companies are working on creating completely new designs for the air taxi market, Horizon Aircraft is creating an aircraft that flies 98 percent of its missions just like a normal aircraft, Brandon Robinson, CEO of Horizon Aircraft told Aviation Today.



What makes Horizon's eVTOL development program different?
  • Robinson: "It fundamentally flies like a normal aircraft and then it has a VTOL [vertical take-off and landing] mode that engages for landing, and for taking off vertically if you should so choose to do that."

  • The Cavorite X5 is a hybrid-electric VTOL with a patented fan-in-wing design. It can carry up to five passengers and has a 500 km range. It has a pusher prop in the back which is uses for thrust 90 percent of the time when flying, Robinson said. When taking off or landing, it can use the 16 fans hidden inside its wings. 

  • Robinson: “So the wings open up and reveal an array of lift fans that are buried in both wings. They're very simple, very light fans, but they're high power...Those fans spin up and provide the vertical thrust to get the aircraft airborne. Now as soon as we transition forward, the main prop at the back engages and pushes the aircraft forward, the landing gear comes up, and then wings slowly close. That process is completed at a prescribed speed, and then you're flying like a normal airplane.” 

  • Robinson said the reasoning behind choosing to go with a hybrid option instead of full electric was based on the weight of the batteries required for full electric operations, the range restrictions it requires, and the turn around times for charging the needed batteries.

  • To maximize the amount of cargo or passengers the aircraft can carry it would not make sense to choose a fuel source that is so much less dense than fuel. 

Robinson said Horizon Aircraft is partnering with multiple companies but could not disclose which ones right now. Horizon Aircraft also recently merged with Astro Aerospace in a deal which will be completed in April. 


Read the full story here.
MQ-25 May Add ISR And Strike; Navy Sees 40 Percent Unmanned Air Wing Future
Image: U.S. Navy

A Navy official on March 18 said the service sees the MQ-25A Stingray unmanned carrier-based tanker possibly eventually adding strike missions and that up to 40 percent of the future air wing could be unmanned.

During a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee on Thursday, ranking member Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.) said he thinks the Navy must start these kinds of unmanned systems with the end goal in mind.


What future ISR upgrades could be coming to the MQ-25 in the near future?
  • Wittman: “The Navy needs to develop an unmanned, long range, carrier-based, penetrating strike capability. Yet, this nascent UCLASS program was usurped to field a far less capable MQ-25 tanking drone. I understand the need, I understand the timeframes, but we want to make sure we have the balance between time and developed capability to make sure we have the long-term in mind, not just the short-term."

  • Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Miss.) asked if the Navy plans to incorporate strike options into the MQ-25 mission set after it is fielded.

  • Vice Adm. James Kilby, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for Warfighting Requirements and Capabilities: "I think the MQ-25 has great promise for us…our initial focus is to introduce this platform and get it introduced into the airwing where it can serve its role initially in tanking and limited [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance or ISR] from that perspective."

  • Kilby said for now the Navy is focused on launching, landing, moving the aircraft on the deck, taking it to and from a carrier hangar bay, and how to position the assets.

  • He noted that currently some F/A-18 E/F fighters are acting as tankers. And the MQ-25 will initially focus on allowing them to move back to strike missions.
The Navy plans to use the MQ-25 to refuel fighters near the carrier initially, “but eventually at range," according to Kilby.

Read the full story here.
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