MightyFly Unveils Third Generation Aircraft, Unlocks “Unprecedented Efficiencies for Same-Day Deliveries” 

Yes­ter­day (Jan­u­ary 25th), car­go drone man­u­fac­tur­er, MightyFly, host­ed an unveil­ing event of its new Cen­to autonomous third-gen­er­a­tion air­craft to its investors, part­ners, poten­tial cus­tomers and gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives at the company’s HQ in San Lean­dro, CA, reports a press release. This includ­ed sev­er­al sta­tion­ary demon­stra­tions.

The lat­est MF100 eVTOL can car­ry one hun­dred pounds of car­go for six hun­dred miles and has sev­er­al new tech­ni­cal char­ac­ter­is­tics. They include:-

: A larg­er car­go bay.

: A bi-wing design to enable a large trim of the air­craft cen­tre of lift.

: The use of struc­tur­al con­duc­tors to increase reli­a­bil­i­ty and reduce weight.

: A com­pos­ite struc­ture to increase pay­load capac­i­ty by reduc­ing struc­tur­al weight.

: A mod­u­lar design to opti­mise main­te­nance.

: The use of the canard as land­ing gear to low­er drag and dri­ve effi­cien­cy.

The new eVTOL also presents “improved oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy through MightyFly’s Autonomous Load Mas­ter­ing Sys­tem (ALMS) com­po­nent, which will enable the air­craft to autonomous­ly open and close its car­go bay door, receive and eject pack­ages into and from the car­go bay open­ing, move and secure pack­ages in the car­go bay via an inter­nal posi­tion­ing and lock­ing sys­tem, and sense and com­pute weight and bal­ance,” explains the release.

All of these tasks can be done autonomous­ly, with­out requir­ing an oper­a­tor to repo­si­tion the pack­ages inside the air­craft. This helps to min­imise the ground oper­a­tion. 

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Man­al Habib, co-Founder and CEO of MightyFly, com­ment­ed, “We are very excit­ed to unveil the 2024 Cen­to that cou­ples inno­va­tion with effi­cien­cy in design, main­te­nance, and oper­a­tion, bring­ing to the world the key to trans­form the expe­dit­ed logis­tics mar­ket.” She con­tin­ued, “MightyFly’s new eVTOL will rev­o­lu­tionise indus­tries such as man­u­fac­tur­ing, retail, and health­care, and will trans­form life in rur­al and remote areas.”

The release con­tin­ues, “The eVTOL is cur­rent­ly work­ing with Agili­ty Prime and Air Mobil­i­ty Com­mand in the devel­op­ment of the ALMS fea­ture to solve the U.S. Air Force’s most press­ing autonomous aer­i­al logis­tics needs.” 

And con­tin­ues, “Addi­tion­al­ly, the MightyFly’s third gen­er­a­tion air­craft has been designed to accom­mo­date a rel­a­tive­ly large range of pay­loads’ cen­tre of grav­i­ty, which allows for a high degree of vari­ance in car­go con­tents, den­si­ties, con­sti­tu­tions, load­ing order, and tie-down posi­tions. This design attribute is expect­ed to be a key tech­nol­o­gy dif­fer­en­tia­tor for the Cen­to plat­form and its util­i­ty to be extreme­ly valu­able and com­pet­i­tive in the mar­ket. “

The aircraft’s car­go bay is sig­nif­i­cant­ly larg­er than its sec­ond gen­er­a­tion pre­de­ces­sor. This allows the deliv­ery of larg­er pack­ages and goods, includ­ing the tra­di­tion­al cool­er box­es used to trans­port donor organs for trans­plan­ta­tion and blood bags. It also ben­e­fits addi­tion­al use cas­es and busi­ness­es in the indus­tries of logis­tics, man­u­fac­tur­ing, health­care, phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal, retail, auto­mo­tive, and oil and gas, as well as organ­i­sa­tions per­form­ing human­i­tar­i­an and dis­as­ter relief work, and government’s defence teams exe­cut­ing var­i­ous logis­tics and resup­ply mis­sions. 

The event also includ­ed a pre­sen­ta­tion by one of MightyFly’s investors, Tim Drap­er, Found­ing Part­ner of Drap­er Asso­ciates, who talked of the great poten­tial of the third-gen­er­a­tion Cen­to.

He remarked, “The vehi­cle you see today is a tes­ti­mo­ny of MightyFly’s tal­ent, cre­ativ­i­ty, inno­va­tion, and decades of indus­try exper­tise. This tech­nol­o­gy will help save lives and solve painful logis­tics needs of busi­ness­es around the globe.”

Man­al Habib (Cred­it — VFS pho­to by Ken­neth I. Swartz)

MightyFly con­clud­ed pro­duc­tion of this new air­craft in ear­ly Jan­u­ary 2024 and will begin its qual­i­fi­ca­tion tri­als in Feb­ru­ary, which include a test plan pre­vi­ous­ly fol­lowed for its pre­de­ces­sor air­craft. 

In the fall of 2024, the com­pa­ny will pub­licly debut its autonomous car­go air­craft deliv­ery flights in Michi­gan, demon­strat­ing point-to-point autonomous deliv­ery use cas­es to part­ners and poten­tial cus­tomers. 

MightyFly is also sched­uled to demon­strate its autonomous load­ing, unload­ing, and bal­anc­ing of pack­ages capa­bil­i­ty to the U.S. Air Force in ear­ly 2025 to include addi­tion­al Proof of Con­cept pro­grams. 

For more infor­ma­tion

www.mightyfly.com

(Top image: MightyFly­’s third gen­er­a­tion air­craft, the 2024 Cen­to, revealed at MightyFly’s head­quar­ters in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area)