Watch Video: “Stunning Footage of Windracers Autonomous Aircraft Flying over Antarctica”

A few weeks back, evtolinsights.com cov­ered the sto­ry of the UK-based Win­drac­ers team who have arrived at the Rothera Research Sta­tion in Antarc­ti­ca, to tri­al its new ULTRA unmanned Aer­i­al Vehi­cle (UAV).

The air­craft is designed for extreme envi­ron­ments includ­ing very cold con­di­tions. The craft is a ful­ly autonomous, twin-engine, 10-metre fixed-winged, capa­ble of car­ry­ing 100 kg of car­go or sen­sors up to 1000 km.

If these tri­als prove suc­cess­ful, then ULTRA could become a major addi­tion to the British Antarc­tic Survey’s (BAS) sci­en­tif­ic capa­bil­i­ties. The UAV incor­po­rates a high lev­el of redun­dan­cy and can con­tin­ue to fly even if one of the engines or com­po­nents is dam­aged or fails. The craft also has been designed to be fixed in the field with a min­i­mal num­ber of parts.

Since the sto­ry broke the team has filmed the craft fly­ing over the region sur­round­ing the Rothera Research Sta­tion and its near­by islands.

Please Watch Video

Carl Robin­son, Head of Air­borne Sur­vey Tech­nol­o­gy & UAVs at BAS, com­ment­ed, “So far so good, every­thing has very much gone to plan and the Win­drac­ers ULTRA has shown it can robust­ly gath­er a range of sci­ence data. Our ini­tial flights have been up to 1.5 hours long with even longer mis­sions planned in the next cou­ple of months.”

Tom Jor­dan, the lead project sci­en­tist, added, “Ini­tial data is already show­ing the plat­forms can col­lect high-qual­i­ty envi­ron­men­tal infor­ma­tion use­ful to a range of sci­ence dis­ci­plines.”

Dur­ing the ini­tial test­ing phase, the Win­drac­ers ULTRA will be deployed around this Antarc­ti­ca Area

For more infor­ma­tion

https://windracers.com/

https://www.bas.ac.uk/

(Images: Win­drac­ers)

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