SEE the Airtruck and Sprayhawk in action
spraying—operations that involve applying pesti- cides, herbicides, and fungicides to row crops and orchards—as a primary market in the midwestern United States. “Ag is somewhere where there’s a clear use case for this today and people who want it. It’s kind of that simple,” Frank says. Only “a small fraction” of aerial applicators
want BVLOS operating capability, Xu says, which simplifies the regulatory and technical hurdles for remotely piloted helicopters. “The thing that they really want is high levels
of automation,” Xu notes. “They don’t want to be hand-flying this thing around. What they want is to click a button and it’ll spray the field. We’ve seen a shift toward high levels of automation for this specific use case and stripping back some of the more technically challenging things, like very long-range flight.” In recent years, farmers have flocked to
remotely piloted UAVs from companies such as DJI and Yamaha to apply chemicals to their crops. Still, UAVs, which are far smaller than traditional aircraft, remain a tiny part of the overall mix for row-crop spraying and other work in agricultural aviation, says Andrew Moore, CEO of the National Agricultural Aviation Association (NAAA). For most ag-spraying operations, growers
provide size and shape files to load into computer programs or apps that design aerial treatment plans. Once they’re completed, pilots download the programmed plans to USB drives and feed them to the UAV. This process will work just as well with the Sprayhawk, Frank says. “We’re not trying to reinvent the wheel with
everything here,” Frank says. “We’re trying to make use of the existing systems, tools, and pro- cesses that people already have in place.” More than a quarter of all US cropland, or
about 127 million acres, is sprayed, according to NAAA data. Helicopters make up about 16% of the domestic fleet of aerial applicators, with fixed- wing aircraft making up the bulk of the field. “Nothing beats the speed and hopper [pay-
load] capacity of a manned helicopter or fixed- wing aircraft flights,” Moore says. About 900 agriculture operators are currently
registered with the FAA to fly UAVs under Part 137 regulations, with about 1,940 vehicles registered
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for aerial application. These UAVs are almost exclusively a “complementary addition” to the same operators’ manned-helicopter and fixed- wing aircraft flights, Moore says. “I do think there’s some competition [with tra-
ditional helicopters], but you’re seeing uncrewed aircraft treating areas you typically wouldn’t try to get [a crewed] aircraft into for safety reasons,” Moore continues. “And that’s what some of the hybrid operations are doing.” One of the operational issues smaller UAVs
confront is the sheer size of most midwestern fields that grow corn, soybeans, and other crops. The industry requires multiple manned assets to accomplish the needed spraying, Moore says. “There’s no way that acreage can be treated
by current commercial UAVs,” Moore adds. “It’s manned aircraft because of their speed and capacity. [Because of] the amount of corn in Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Nebraska, and other corn states, you have [manned] ag aircraft coming in from other states” in high season to meet the demand. Current UAV operations also require workers
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