MightyFly Performs “Autonomous Flight, Cargo Operations for USAF”

MightyFly, a man­u­fac­tur­er and oper­a­tor of autonomous, fixed-wing, hybrid eVTOL car­go air­craft, has suc­cess­ful­ly con­duct­ed a live flight demon­stra­tion for the U.S Air Force (USAF) as part of its SBIR Phase II con­tract under the Depart­ment of the Air Force’s AFWERX pro­gram, reports a press release. 

The demon­stra­tion, held at the New Jerusalem Air­port last month, “show­cased MightyFly’s autonomous Cen­to car­go air­craft and its patent­ed Autonomous Load Mas­ter­ing Sys­tem (ALMS),” explains the release. “The Cen­to exe­cut­ed a DoD-rel­e­vant mis­sion, demon­strat­ing autonomous flight, car­go load­ing, unload­ing, and onboard pack­age han­dling and bal­ance man­age­ment.” 

The car­go craft trans­port­ed two large box­es from ori­gin to des­ti­na­tion. 

Before take­off, the ALMS-equipped Cen­to autonomous­ly posi­tioned and secured the pack­ages into its car­go com­part­ment. The release con­tin­ues, “The air­craft then closed its nose cone, took off, flew to the des­ti­na­tion, land­ed and eject­ed the pack­ages with­out human inter­ven­tion. It then con­tin­ued to a third des­ti­na­tion.” 

The demo also includ­ed autonomous han­dling of rep­re­sen­ta­tive pack­ages across key sec­tors, includ­ing health­care, retail, logis­tics, man­u­fac­tur­ing, dis­as­ter relief and defence. 

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The recent Don­ald Trump Pres­i­den­tial Exec­u­tive Order sup­port­ing domes­tic eVTOL adop­tion, high­lights the use of these air­craft for “med­ical response, car­go trans­port and rur­al access mis­sions,” that align with MightyFly’s mod­el.

This Exec­u­tive Order presents an oppor­tu­ni­ty for the com­pa­ny as it posi­tions itself as a nation­al asset in next-gen­er­a­tion logis­tics, offer­ing high effi­cien­cy ser­vices, min­i­mal infra­struc­ture require­ments, and low oper­a­tional costs for both com­mer­cial and defence appli­ca­tions. 

MightyFly’s Cen­to has a pay­load capac­i­ty of up to 500 lbs; a range of 600 miles; and a speed of 150 mph. Based in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area, the com­pa­ny was found­ed in 2019. 

There is finan­cial back­ing from Drap­er Asso­ciates, At One Ven­tures, 500 Star­tups, Glob­al Founders Cap­i­tal, Graph Ven­tures, Halo­gen Ven­tures and Side Door Ven­tures. 

MightyFly was named a “Top Sup­ply Chain Start­up to Watch” in 2022 by Busi­ness Insid­er.

For more infor­ma­tion

https://mightyfly.com/

https://afresearchlab.com/

https://afwerx.com

(Images: Might­Fly)

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