If there’s anything that frustrates drone owners more than anything it’s the short battery time and I am sure that’s what Impossible Aerospace was thinking about when they decided to design a lightweight drone that would basically be a flying battery in itself.
The company’s first product, the US-1, has recently emerged, promising to be be able to stay in flight for about four times longer than the other electric drones out there.
Spencer Gore, the company’s CEO, has previously been employed by Tesla as a battery engineer, so we can expect he knows what he’s doing since he has developed the drone to carry your usual ion battery cells basically within the drone, as structural elements. This allows the US-1 to carry more battery at an equivalent weight.
The drone has a 4.4 pound payload of optical or thermal sensors and it can stay in the air for 90 minutes. It is mainly aimed towards customers within government branches, like law enforcement, fire and rescue or even private security.
Credit: Impossible Aerospace
It’s an unusual move for a drone maker, but a smart one – if the flight time can truly be achieved, it would give the company a strong position in the market from the first go.
There’s hundreds of Chinese-made products out there, available for anyone to pick and choose from, but government agencies would be far more interested in paying more money for performance, unlike the general public, who is more interested in a bargain.
To give you an idea, the base US-1 model price starts at $7,500 and the thermal package would bring it to $9,500, and that’s without a camera.
In spite of the pricing, if the drone does prove to work as intended, this is not the last we’ll hear of it and it will most likely change the game and raise the stakes for the entire drone industry, as we know it.
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