The primary experimental drone that Parallel Flight Technology (PFT) developed can transport 75 of kilos for one hour, 50 kilos for two.7 hours, or 10 kilos for six.Four hours. They’re presently designing what they name a beta stage plane that may haul 100 kilos for hours.

“We’re constructing a brand new drone expertise and it may be used for lots of various issues, however wildfire would actually be the use case that was the impetus for me to even begin on this challenge,” Joshua Resnick, the CEO of PFT told us in November. “We had a fireplace not removed from our residence in Santa Cruz, California in 2017 both proper earlier than or proper after the Santa Rosa Fireplace, and it was after that that I began wanting into the totally different ways in which unmanned methods might be utilized in a wildfire effort. That’s once I began understanding that utilizing unmanned methods to resupply firefighters might be very helpful particularly when manned plane couldn’t fly resulting from smoke inversions or nighttime.”

Mr. Resnick, previously the lead electrical engineer that helped design the Tesla all-electric battery-powered semi-trailer truck, is among the three folks that created PFT.

As a substitute of counting on batteries to drive the brand new drone’s propellers, the plane is powered by 4 hybrid energy modules, every with a gas-electric mixture. The two-cycle fuel engines work together with the electrical motors, which offer very excessive peak thrust in addition to redundancy. Bigger plane within the PFT’s pipeline might be powered by different fuels, resembling diesel or jet gasoline.

In the video under Mr. Resnick begins speaking about the way it might be used on fires at 4:35.

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