Unmanned aircraft have yet to fulfill their initial promise of greater efficiency, according to Tom Clancy, CTO and vice president of Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation. At ASC16, Clancy said “unmanned systems take more people to operate than manned systems.” So, while UAVs have certainly reduced risk to personnel by removing them from the battle space, the next challenge to solve is “how can we deliver on lower cost” by having “more robots do the work of less people,” Clancy said.
The Defense Innovation Unit is gearing up for the first flight of its commercially developed hypersonic testbed as soon as the end of February—part of a larger project to quickly increase the cadence of the Pentagon’s hypersonic flight testing and field advanced, high-speed systems and components at scale.
