Angeline Leishman
Veteran-owned small business Platform Aerospace is planning to advance the development of its Vanilla family of unmanned aerial vehicles to potentially secure deployment contracts with the Department of Defense, C4ISRNET reported Tuesday.
Greg Pappianou, chief growth officer at Platform Aero, shared in a Defense News interview that the company eyes improvements to three configurations of the Group 3 UAVs that would fit different military missions.
Platform Aero plans to extend the flight hours and envelope of a Vanilla long-endurance variant, demonstrate five-day flights carrying a full payload with a Vanilla multi-payload type and showcase a vertical take off Vanilla that can fly with a 50-pound payload in a day.
“But don’t lose sight of the fact that the reason we’re doing that is to further harden that five-day aircraft that’s going to be loaded to the gills,” noted Pappianou.
Vanilla, which recently set the over eight-day unrefueled flight world record, has been already been involved in experiments with U.S. Southern Command, NASA, Naval Air Systems Command and Office of Naval Research that tackle airborne payload operations at extended durations.
