HENNIKER, NH (AP) — When Hector Xu was learning to fly a helicopter in college, he recalled having some “bad experiences” while trying to navigate at night.

The awe-inspiring flights led him to research unmanned aircraft systems while earning his doctorate in aerospace engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then formed Rotor Technologies in 2021 to develop unmanned helicopters.

Rotor has built two autonomous Sprayhawks and aims to have up to 20 ready for sale next year. The company is also developing helicopters that would transport cargo to disaster zones and offshore oil rigs. The helicopter could also be used to fight fires.

For now, Rotor is focusing on the agricultural sector, which has embraced drone automation, but sees unmanned helicopters as a better way to spray larger areas with pesticides and fertilizers.

On Wednesday, Rotor plans to conduct a public flight test of the Sprayhawk at an agricultural aviation show in Texas.

“People would call us and say, ‘hey, I want to use this for dusting, right?’ We would say, OK, maybe,” Xu said, adding that they got enough calls to realize it was a huge untapped market. Associated Press reporters were the first people outside the company to witness a test flight of the Sprayhawk. It hovered, flew forward and splashed the tarmac before landing.

Rotor’s nearly $1 million Sprayhawk helicopter is a Robinson R44, but the four seats have been replaced with flight computers and communications systems to allow for remote operation. It has five cameras, as well as laser detection technology and a radar altimeter that make reading the terrain more accurate, along with GPS and motion sensors.

At the company’s hangar in Nashua, New Hampshire, Xu said the technology means there is better visibility of terrain at night.

One of the big attractions of automation in agricultural aviation is safety.

Because crop dusters fly at about 150 mph (240 km/h) and only about 10 feet (3 meters) off the ground, there are dozens of accidents every year when planes collide with power lines, cell towers. and other planes. Older, poorly maintained aircraft and pilot fatigue contribute to accidents.

A 2014 report by the National Transportation Safety Board found that between 2001 and 2010, there were more than 800 farm accidents, including 81 that were fatal. A separate report by the National Aviation Agriculture Association found nearly 640 accidents from 2014 to this month, with 109 deaths.

“It’s a very, very dangerous profession, and there are several deaths every year,” said Dan Martin, a research engineer with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service. “They make all their money in those few short months, so sometimes it can mean they’re flying 10 to 12 hours a day or more.”

Workplace hazards also include exposure to chemicals.

In recent years, safety concerns and cheaper cost have led to a the proliferation of drones flying over farmers’ fields, Martin said, adding that about 10,000 will likely be sold this year alone.

“It’s growing exponentially as a market, very quickly,” Martin said.

But the size of drones and their limited battery power means they can only cover a fraction of the area of ​​a plane and helicopters. This provides an opening for companies building larger drones, such as Rotor and another company Pyka.

California-based Pyka announced in August that it had sold its first autonomous electric crop protection aircraft to a customer in the United States. Pyka’s Pelican Spray, a fixed-wing aircraft, received FAA approval last year to fly commercially for crop protection. The company also sold its Pelican spray to Dole for use in Honduras and to the Brazilian company, SLC Agrícola.

Lukas Koch, chief technology officer at Heinen Brothers Agra Services, the company that bought Pelican Spray in August, called drones part of a coming “revolution” that will save farmers money and improve safety.

The Kansas-based company operates airports from Texas to Illinois. Koch doesn’t envision the unmanned aircraft replacing all of the company’s dozens of pilots, but rather taking over the riskiest jobs.

“The biggest draw is getting the pilot out of the aircraft in those more dangerous situations,” Koch said. “There are still fields surrounded by trees on all the borders, or you have big, big power lines or other hazards, wind turbines, things like that. It can be hard to fly around.”

But Koch acknowledges that autonomous aviation systems could introduce new dangers to an already chaotic airspace — though that’s less of a concern in rural areas with lots of open space and fewer people.

“Putting more systems into the air that do not have a pilot inside could introduce new dangers to our current pilots and make their lives even more dangerous,” he said. “If you have this large helicopter flying beyond line of sight, how is it going to react when it sees you? What will he do? … That’s a huge question mark, one that we take very seriously.”

Companies like Rotor have built in contingencies in case something goes wrong—its helicopter has half a dozen communications systems and, for now, a remote-controlled pilot.

If the ground team loses contact with the helicopter, Rotor has a system that Xu called a big, red button that ensures the engine can be shut down and the helicopter makes a controlled landing. “That means we’ll never have an airplane flight event,” he said.

The safety measures will go a long way in helping the company receive what it expects to be FAA regulatory approval to fly its helicopters commercially. Once they have that, the challenge, as Xu sees it, will be scaling up to meet demand in the United States, but also Brazil, which has a huge agricultural market but a more relaxed regulatory environment.

“I think 2025 will be a manufacturing hell, as Elon Musk calls it,” Xu said. “There’s kind of a difference between building a couple and building tens and hundreds to scale…These aren’t just like bespoke Rolls-Royces anymore. You want to knock them out like you would produce production cars.”

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