Vector Robotics has completed 24 hours and 5 minutes of continuous electric flight with a small unmanned aircraft measuring 2.96 m wingspan and 3.1 kg take-off weight. The aircraft remained powered from takeoff to landing, crossed the night and real weather, and landed safely with battery still available. For us, the relevance of this result is not only the number itself. It shows that persistent unmanned flight does not necessarily require large fuel-powered aircraft, heavy MALE/HALE platforms, high noise, high maintenance and complex logistics.
Vector Robotics was founded to concentrate more than twenty years of hands-on UAV design, flight testing and solar-electric aircraft development into real operational platforms. The same architecture behind this flight comes from our work on long-flight-time UAVs for wildfire prevention, environmental monitoring, civil protection, mapping and ISR missions.
Our first project FireHound, for example, was born from a simple idea: if a small electric aircraft can stay airborne for many hours, it can monitor large areas silently and detect wildfire risks before they become disasters. The same logic now extends to other missions where persistence, low acoustic signature, low operating cost and deployability matter more than size.
This flight is not a laboratory estimate and not a brochure claim. It is a real aircraft, carrying real avionics, electronics and payload-capable architecture, proving that small electric UAVs are no longer limited by definition to short missions.
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