ROTOR TECHNOLOGIES: TACKLING THE DULL, DIRTY & DANGEROUS
Rotor is also selling an R550 variant for utility and construction work, dubbed the Airtruck, which has a payload capacity of 1,000 lb. (Rotor Technologies Photo)
[aircraft] up,” notes Chris Martino, VAI’s senior director of operations and international affairs. Some of the FAA’s exemptions for Part 107 involve aircraft that operate below 400 ft. (122 m) and under 87 kt. (100 mph), both of which would apply to Sprayhawk agriculture flights. In this era of growing experimen-
tation with rechargeable UASs, the Sprayhawk comes with two other sell- ing points: the aircraft can be loaded on a trailer for road transport, without the need for rotor stowage or other mod- ifications, and it runs on plain 100LL aviation fuel. In many remote areas, charging
and swapping batteries on a UAV out in the field can prove far more vexing for operators than finding 100LL or simply bringing along extra avgas, Xu says. And larger UAVs often require partial disassembly for trailer transport because of their rotor design, Xu adds. Rotor is also developing a 24/7
“piloting-as-a-service” product called Cloudpilot. It uses satellite, cellular/ LTE, and radio links to enable aircraft to operate autonomously around the world, potentially eliminating the need to deploy a human pilot to each R550 worksite and thereby saving money. The company describes Cloudpilot as a “human-supervised autonomy service”—an alternative to having a human safety pilot on board to take the controls when issues arise. Rotor executives also envision a
secondary but potentially significant line of business: using its propri- etary Cloudpilot technology to help equip other VTOL aircraft to operate remotely.
44 POWER UP SEP 2024
“There’s only so many UAVs we can
build. There’s only so many people who want to buy an R44-sized capability- and-cost aircraft,” Xu says. “And I think this is the way for us to scale our impact more quickly.”
Why Agriculture? Across the vertical aviation industry, boosting the safety of “dull, dirty, and dangerous” missions has been a decades-long effort.
“We talked to almost 200 helicopter
operators to hear about their prob- lems and to think about where the opportunities were,” says Frank. “We decided that dull, dirty, and dangerous was where we should start. It’s where unmanned aircraft clearly had the best kind of near-term value proposition, where the regulatory case and prec- edent were the strongest, where the safety case was the easiest.” Rotor identified agricultural
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