“Army Aviation has already proven its effectiveness in countering UAVs. The next stage is developing joint tactics for employing manned aviation alongside unmanned systems. Will a machine eventually replace the human in the helicopter cockpit? Perhaps. But certainly not today. And not tomorrow either”, — the representative of Ukraine’s Army Aviation concluded.
slaps roof of Bell
I think the evolution of drones will eventually lead to a new aircraft system. A multi rotor configuration powered by a turbines, and capable of lifting loads similar to, or greater than, an Osprey. Mainly as a cargo system for moving large factor ammo, like drones, missiles or artillery shells. But also capable of moving supplies or being a quick evac.
Yeah, China has an unmanned tilt-rotor and large cargo quadcopter, but the MV-75 Cheyenne II is undoubtedly the most promising direction in my opinion. I don’t understand the idea of designing large aircraft to be unmanned, after a certain size it just starts to seem ridiculous to me unless the aircraft is a specialized sensor platform like a Global Hawk or something… It is trivial, indeed probably a future requirement to sell aircraft on the civilian market as a baseline option… to have autonomous flight capability on manned aircraft. The first use of an autonomous emergency system in an actual emergency successfully happened a couple of months ago…
So yeah, I think there are a lot of interesting avenues here but the important thing is that electric motors allow entirely new aerodynamics to exploited such as VSTOL “blown lift” aircraft and more traditional multirotor coptors. There are genuinely whole new categories of aircraft here because of the ease of maintaining many smaller electric engines vs combustion engines, it is exciting!
I think the most promising cargo drones are Windracers cargo designs (heavily used in Ukraine, but the details are intriguingly scarce…) or Pyka type drones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windracers
https://nextgendefense.com/us-dropship-cargo-drone/
I think there is a simple wisdom to this size of fixed wing reliable cargo drone that naturally presents a new optimal use case that manned aircraft just naturally wouldn’t optimize for. In particular when capacities for dropping cargo by parachute are considered as well.
they should call it the arsenal bird. (ace combat 7 reference)