On Wednesday, Nov. 20, a couple hundred people gathered in front of a hangar at Perot Field Fort Worth Alliance Airport in Texas. They were there to watch a test flight of Rotor Technologies’ Sprayhawk — an uncrewed agricultural helicopter based on the Robinson R44 — and many of them had come directly from the National Agricultural Aviation Association’s annual expo in downtown Fort Worth.
The Sprayhawk fired up its Lycoming IO-540 engine and its blades began turning — a normal start, with the notable exception that the pilot, Joao Magioni, was sitting in a trailer behind the aircraft. After warming up for a minute or two, the unoccupied helicopter picked up into a high hover, then made a few passes back and forth over the ramp. The flight area approved for it by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) was limited and marked with traffic cones, but it had just enough space to demonstrate the use of its 33-foot (10-meter) spray boom system, which emitted a shower of water that shimmered in the late afternoon sun.
The roughly five-minute flight was the first public showcase of the Sprayhawk, which can carry up to 110 gallons (around 415 liters) of liquid, making it one of the largest commercial uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) in the world. Yet the development was arguably more evolutionary than revolutionary, because except for the absence of the onboard pilot, nothing about it was unfamiliar to the helicopter operators in the crowd.
“As a helicopter operator, I don’t look at this as a threat,” said Helicopter Institute president Randy Rowles, who co-hosted the event along with Hillwood, the real estate developer behind Alliance Airport. “I look at it as a dull and dangerous type of operation solution, and one that we can get to market. And as an operator, having the same helicopter that I’m operating every day and turning that into an uncrewed vehicle, that makes a lot of sense to me.”
Nashua, New Hampshire-based Rotor’s evolutionary approach to deploying autonomy in existing aircraft is not unique. On the fixed-wing side of the industry, startups Reliable Robotics and Merlin Labs are both working to develop autonomy solutions for the workhorse Cessna Caravan, initially for civil and military cargo missions. In the vertical-lift sector, however, eVTOL developers have captured most of the investment and attention with radically new aircraft designs that are primarily focused on passenger transport.
Many of these companies are using remotely piloted aircraft for flight testing and aim to certify autonomous versions of their aircraft eventually. But in the U.S. and Europe, the regulatory barriers to certifying uncrewed aircraft are steep, which is why most Western eVTOL developers plan to launch commercial operations with onboard pilots first.
Rotor founder Hector Xu also envisions a future world where autonomous aircraft are routinely used to carry passengers. In the meantime, though, he’s starting at the other end of the spectrum, with a focus on “dull and dangerous” missions like spraying that do not require aircraft certificated for passenger-carrying flight. This is similar to the approach of California-based Pyka, although that startup has developed an electric fixed-wing aircraft for spray and cargo missions.
