Will special operators fly armed dune buggies into battles of the future?

Welcome back. Special Forces troops often need asymmetric capabilities for difficult missions, so this one fits right in

A fan-powered dune buggy that flies to targets under a parachute canopy and can be mounted with guns

You heard that right. At this year's Soft Week, we got up close with the Skyrunner. Check it out

We're at the Skyrunner booth at the Global Soft Foundation's annual Soft Week in Tampa, Florida

Pretty popular device here, a little off-road capacity. We were talking about Stuart, about what we're looking at

So Stuart, tell me what we got behind us. So you're looking at an FA-certified aircraft

It has four wheels, so it's very unique, right? So from an operating standpoint, you can fly in 98% of the airspace in the U.S

The design started for my kids. This was really for my ranch

And the powered parachute has one of the best safety records in aviation. So that was very appealing if I'm going to put my kids in it

Navy SEALs got a hold of this. So when they saw it, they said, hey, this solves a lot of problems for us

They came to Shreveport, and we redesigned the whole aircraft. So we redesigned it with mechanical redundancy

So here's all the things that can go wrong, and you're not immobilized. So, for example, the air filters

We have the same air filters on the ground system, which is the ground engine, as we do the aircraft engine

So if you ever lost an air filter, you can just substitute it, just like a space shuttle, right

There's always redundancy. There's two of everything. Same with the fluids the coolants The wiring harness is all mil so you can change it in the battle space if you had to If you lost an engine you not immobilized so if you had a 50 round go into the ground engine and immobilize the engine we can go faster with the prop on the ground

So, yeah, so you always have a level of redundancy, so no one wants to be immobilized. What kind of range, what kind of distance can these things travel, and what kind of speeds do you have on the ground

So, with this fuel cell, which is 25 gallons, we're getting 200 miles in the air

and we're getting 400 miles on the ground. Speed-wise on the ground is 70 miles an hour

It's ground capable, but it's an FAA certified aircraft, so it's built, assembled, manufactured as an aircraft and regulated as an aircraft

But absolutely ground capable. In the air, we're getting 46 miles an hour and a little over four hours on one tank of gas

What kind of stuff can this carry as far as weight? So our payload's 900 pounds

It's about 1% of the cost of a Predator drone system with twice the payload. We'll start here at the front and work our way to the rear

Can you show us some of the major features of the vehicle? Sure. So the tires here, these are bighorn tires, but they're filled with a foam

So you can shoot the tire with an AK-762 round or a 5.56 NATO round

It will not immobilize the vehicle. That was a big thing to solve. Second, so you've got, if you come around here, your off-road is on this side and your aviation is on this side

So it's very simple. You know what you're looking at where. For gas, you have the gas pedal brake, very intuitive, just like any other car

And when you take off, when the wing is overhead, these come out. So these are how you fly

You have pitch and roll, so there's only two input controls. Where most aircraft have three, so if you climb, so when we climb out

turn the prop on that how we climb This is how we cruise and that how we land Now if we want to turn left and right as these when the chutes overhead it pulls these out so if i push in

i'm going to turn right if i push in over there i turn left and my hands are free so if i if i

have a primary weapon i can still use my primary weapon so moving to the back we use a modified

rotax engine so we're getting 197 horsepower off this and 603 newton meters of torque off the crank

We lay out. So we do a warm-up. We want to get, this is a high-performance engine, so we want the oil to be 120 degrees before we put a lot of pressure into the engine

We warm that up. We do a walk-around checklist. We take the wing off the top

We unzip it. We lay it back. We spread the wing out. We just look at the lines, make sure there's no knots, tension knots, and then we kite it forward

So when we take off, we drive it forward, and 20 feet, the wing comes up over your head

So it's out of harm's way with the propeller. So you're driving it forward

You're evaluating the wing. At 25 miles an hour, there's no oscillation to the wing

You turn the prop on, and when you push up, when you hit 40 miles an hour, you're off the ground

So in less than 600 feet or 200 meters, you're off the ground. When you say wing, what does that look like

What is this wing doing? Okay, so it's a PD performance design canopy or ram air wing

So it looks like a parachute. So it folds up nicely. It's not fixed wing

So, you know, that makes it kind of complicated. If you've got a fixed wing and you hear something crack or something, that's not good

You can jump this thing till the body panels come off, but that wing, as long as it's hooked up here, it's safe

You can lay it out and you can take off. You know, it's not a safety component

So laying out the wing you spread the wing out It about 38 feet wide The surface area is 550 square feet You kite it up when you up and you evaluate the wing and it looks stable and it centered

You turn the prop on, you move the throttle quadrant up, and you're off the ground at 600 feet, 200 meters

So the design philosophy really started from the operators, and then it went to a thesis at the Naval Postgraduate School

how this could be used in contested areas and how that would change the battle space. and then we were influenced by Rand Corporation's white paper with the Air Force on intruditable unmanned assets

So we just received money from the Air Force to make these all autonomous and unmanned

So I had a chute failure in 2005, so I was in a wheelchair and had to learn to walk again

and I can't jump because my arm dislocates in the air, so it's very unsafe

I tore my hamstring off, tore my chest off. So learning, it was very, for me, it crystallizes your values, but what I loved doing was skydiving

That was my passion. So to hang that up was pretty depressing, not being able to do that much

And then I had kids, and then when I heard about a power parachute, it got me back

I'm like, I'm good with canopy. I'm good being under chute. And how badass would that be is if I could just take my kids on adventure safely

It has the best safety record. I was like, oh, that's good. Yeah

And so that skydiving got me back. I wanted to get back in the air. And so this and my kids, that's where the impetus came from

Well, I appreciate you taking the time to walk us through this. There's a lot of cool stuff with this vehicle and a lot of things, a lot of options to create and do new things

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you