High Endurance Attritable Hybrid Electric Drone

An Inexpensive Long-Endurance Drone (ILED) requires a re-evaluation of the approach to UAS design and fielding.  Future systems will be evaluated in terms of the capability of the swarm of aircraft instead of individual aircraft. This change in perspective will cause the design trades to look much different than those made in the initial development and evolution of today’s group 1 and group 2 UAS.  Certain aspects which have, in the past, conspired to increase the size, cost, and capability of aircraft will remain, such as aerodynamic efficiency and the thermodynamic efficiency of small engines.  However, when the individual aircraft is untethered from a single operator, new forces will apply.  Large aircraft used in large numbers require large logistics footprints – small aircraft can be manufactured, transported, and utilized in large numbers without heavy burdens.  Numerous deployed payloads open new opportunities such as multiple effects from a single distributed system including EO/IR full motion video, electronic warfare, resilient communications, assured precision navigation and timing, and kinetic and non-kinetic effects.  This proposed Phase I effort will evaluate the technical variables pertinent to such a system from a first-principals approach and will integrate the results into a high-level ILED system design.