Vertical lift, fixed-wing flight: Get a look at PteroDynamic’s trans-wing aircraft

Welcome back to Defense News Weekly. You may have seen fixed-wing drones and quadcopter drones, but what about one that does both

At this year's SoftWeek in Tampa, Florida, we learned about something called a trans-wing aircraft being developed by Taro Dynamics. Have a look

so my name is Matthew Grotchuk and I'm the CEO of Tero Dynamics and we're here at soft week this

week showcasing our transwing aircraft this is a very novel type of vertical takeoff and landing

aircraft where the wings fold and unfold to transition between configurations that are

optimized for horizontal flight and cruise flight so it's very good for taking off in contested

environments in a confined space. So it takes off in this configuration, which

almost looks like a big DGI drone or a quad copter. But then immediately when it takes off

if you can push that forward, it turns into a fixed wing airplane

So the wings fold forward like that during flight. And we can go from being on the ground, consuming no energy

to be fully on the wing in about seven seconds And then when you look at this aircraft in this configuration you can tell it looks just like any other fixed wing aircraft without compromise It has a very highly efficient cruise profile a high lift to drag ratio And if you saw this

aircraft flying, you would never know that was a VTOL aircraft until it came in for landing

And so when it comes in for landing, the wings simply fold back like that. It turns back into

in this configuration as a quadcopter and it lands like that. And we can have different

configurations with three propulsors per wing depending on what the mission requirements are

So like I said, it's a very unique aircraft and the kind of advantages is that it can fly farther

longer, faster, carry heavier payload weight fractions, use less energy, whether that's

batteries or liquid fuel to be able to fly. And you'll notice that the same propulsors that are

used for lift are used for cruise. So we don't have redundant propulsors

and when we're on the wing, we're typically flying on only two of these props, and we've flown them

on only one prop as well, and that's fine. But all of that power is available

so we can climb at very high rates. We've already demonstrated climb rates

of over 3 feet per minute and we know we can go much higher than that and so it can be used for contested logistics critical cargo logistics you carry sensors EOIR lasers

LIDAR can carry munitions to kinetic missions and other things like that

we're headquartered in Colorado Springs we've been primarily focused on defense missions we have

Most of our contract revenue is coming from the Navy and also the Air Force

Those are all firm-fixed contracts to enhance this trans-wing unique design, which we have patented all over the world

And just in February of this year, we got on a big contract expansion, if you will, with our Navy contract to develop a larger variant of this

our fifth-generation aircraft, which will carry 50 pounds of payload, 400 nautical miles, and still weigh less than 320 pounds

And it will run on a heavy fuel, so JP5 and whatnot

And fully autonomous, right, being able to take up and land on a ship, vision-based navigation

and other fancy secret squirrel stuff. So we're very excited to be on that contract

And in the commercial world too there a profound demand for this kind of technology in the commercial sector as well to deliver high payloads to places that are hard to reach where that time and people are paying a lot of money today to do those missions whether

that's delivery to offshore oil and gas platforms or linear inspections of

power lines, pipelines, that kind of thing. Also more of the critical cargo

logistics missions. Payloads can be contained either embedded within the fuselage. This one was designed to be inside the fuselage where it can fly very efficiently like

that, but we can also configure it to have a slung payload capability too. So far, all of our

customers have not demanded the slung payload capability other than munitions, but that is

certainly a capability that we have. And we would design, customize especially a fuselage for the

mission at hand. So this is a bigger fuselage that's bulbous because it carries the payload

inside, but for ISR and other sensor missions, we would have a more streamlined fuselage

and a way to attach the payloads to the bottom of the aircraft