Navy tests using drones for medical supply deliveries during RIMPAC

Because the Navy appears to additional combine drones into the manned fleet, the ocean service assessed utilizing unmanned aerial techniques to ship crucial provides to the destroyer Curtis Wilbur final month throughout the huge Rim of the Pacific army train.

Whereas these provides are historically delivered to Navy vessels by way of manned plane, such belongings are costly and dealing with manning shortages — inflicting delays that drones might treatment, in response to Navy officers.

The Curtis Wilbur carried out flight assessments utilizing the Skyways V2.6 Unmanned Aerial System and PteroDynamics X-P4 Unmanned Aerial System, launching and recovering six drones between from June 19 to June 24 as a part of the Simply In Time Supply logistics effort with the Naval Air Warfare Heart Plane Division.

“The Navy continues to drive fast experimentation and implementation of latest applied sciences,” Cmdr. Yilei Liu, commanding officer of the Curtis Wilbur, mentioned in a press release. “Whereas simple to configure and able to deploy, it is important to guage these applied sciences in several environmental situations to outline and scope the working envelopes of those extremely succesful platforms.”

In 2021, Naval Air Warfare Heart Plane Division awarded PteroDynamics a contract to ship three vertical take-off and touchdown drone prototypes to the Navy to help delivering restore cargo.

“Embedding autonomous platforms into our already-existing techniques will outline the character of fight operations sooner or later,” Liu mentioned. “As soon as examined, autonomous techniques can present unbiased defensive and offensive capabilities in a contested atmosphere. These techniques can carry out probably harmful, high-risk evolutions with most effectivity and minimal threat to personnel.”

Train Rim of the Pacific, often known as RIMPAC, is a biennial train held close to the Hawaiian Islands and includes practically 30 nations and greater than 25,000 personnel.

The train concludes on Aug. 1.