Parallel Flight Prescribed Burn Flight Testing
We recently showed some behind the scenes of what goes into 3rd party payload integration at PFT. Here is the next step - initial flight testing on our all-electric engineering platform.
In this case, the 3rd party payload is the IGNIS4K system, a powerful land management tool that will be used to execute prescribed fire both for land management and for active wildfire fights.
What were most excited about is that our hybrid system allows for an overall mission that is twice as fast, and requires half of the ground crew, as would be needed with an all-electric aircraft. Not only will it be able to ignite up to 1000 acres, but the drone will have the ability to land, load another round of (4000 spheres) in <5 minutes, and be back up in the air for another hour of work. That's what we call a workhorse!
In this video we are performing an autonomous pattern drop. The next step is moving this over to our hybrid platform, Firefly, for more testing.
Stay tuned! We will be sharing some exciting news, very soon!
