#HTE

Air Drop Alternative: Military Develops Supply-Dropping Drone/Hoverbike

Delivering crucial supplies to people on the ground is a logistics problem faced by both military and humanitarian organizations. One way to do it is via air drops, and we showed you some awesome footage of that here. But “The biggest problem we have with dropping relief supplies is, they don’t land where they’re supposed to,” Lt. Col. Howard Marotto, a U.S. Marine Corps logistician, told Military.com. “They land on a house or behind enemy lines, so the people who really need that materiel don’t get it.”

Thus the Army and the Marines have commissioned a prototype JTARV, or Joint Tactical Aerial Resupply Vehicle, a quadrotor package mule that will be able to carry up to 300 pounds and drop them off with the precision of a package drone.

Colloquially called the Picatinny Pallet, it seems they’re still deciding whether it needs a human pilot or not. In the demonstration above it’s shown being remotely piloted, and described as ultimately being unmanned and autonomous, yet the Army refers to it as a “hoverbike” and on the presentation board you can clearly see a rider in one of the drawings:

The prototype JTARV, which can currently carry only 50 pounds, was designed by Australian mechanical engineer Chris Malloy. We first wrote about Malloy’s invention in 2011, when he was developing it independently, and if you look at his earlier iteration you can see that the design has evolved by comparing it to the walkaround video below:

It’s interesting how they’ve overlapped the rotors in order to narrow the footprint; I didn’t realize lift could be achieved with that Venn Diagram configuration.

The military has been transporting the vehicle to various bases around the country for tests and demonstrations, and thus far they’ve logged 200 hours of flight “without incident.”

The target radius of operations is said to be 20 to 25 miles. It is a shame that the JTARV is still in the prototype phase, as such a vehicle would be perfect for delivering relief supplies to folks in Puerto Rico that are stuck in remote villages with no power, communications or running water.