When Russia launched Sputnik into orbit in 1957 it was a huge blow to America’s technological ego. Though America ultimately won The Race To Space, that event launched the country to become the world’s foremost initiator in technological advancements. Four months later, under the helm of President Eisenhower, the United States government founded the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to ensure this goal. As stated on their website, “For sixty years, DARPA has held to a singular and enduring mission: to make pivotal investments in breakthrough technologies for national security.” Earlier this year DARPA released footage of one of their latest missions, the Gremlins, a reusable military grade drone.

The military is no stranger to the use of drones. Often when people hear the word “drone” military drones are the first thing that comes to mind. The drones being created for and used by the U.S. military are drastically different than the small drones available to the public from companies like DJI, Yuneec, or Parrot. These drones cost millions of dollars each. For the 2019 fiscal budget, the Department of Defense requested nearly $9.39 billion for drones and the technologies associated with them. DARPA’s website states, “For decades, U.S. military air operations have relied on increasingly capable multi-function manned aircraft to execute critical combat and non-combat missions. Adversaries’ abilities to detect and engage those aircraft from longer ranges have improved over time as well, however, driving up the costs for vehicle design, operation and replacement. An ability to send large numbers of small unmanned air systems (UASs) with coordinated, distributed capabilities could provide U.S. forces with improved operational flexibility at much lower cost than is possible with today’s expensive, all-in-one platforms—especially if those unmanned systems could be retrieved for reuse while airborne. So far, however, the technology to project volleys of low-cost, reusable systems over great distances and retrieve them in mid-air has remained out of reach.” One of the goals in DARPA’s creation of Gremlins is to find a cost reductive means of drone deployment by building a drone and platform that can be used for multiple missions and safely retrieved from an airborne carrier.

The Gremlins, named after British pilot’s good luck charms from WWII, looks like a torpedo with two fixed wings along the top of it’s body. It was built for DARPA by Dynetics, a technology solutions company based out of Huntsville, Alabama. It is launched from rubbery launchers, or pylons, onboard a manned aircraft like cargo, bomber, or fighter planes. The pylons can be positioned in an aircraft’s cargo bay or even from the underside of a wing, with the ability to launch several Gremlins at once. Once deployed, and are safe distance from the host carrier, the Gremlins engage their thrusters and can be remotely flown to carry out a variety of missions. In a video released by DARPA they go on to explain that, “Gremlins is an air-recoverable reusable platform enabling an array of emerging technologies to be taken into the operational field, and collaborate with one another. These technologies include secure jam resistant line of sight communications. Sensing payload sweets that can be cooperatively blended to accomplish complex mission objectives. Autonomous capabilities that let swarms of unmanned systems operate together with minimal supervision. And technologies that determine locations in denied environments.”

When designing a way to retrieve the drones while airborne DARPA had one huge obstacle to overcome. They had to find a way to make contact with the drone while avoiding the massive turbulence the host craft creates that would cause the drone to loose control. So they looked to the proven successful model of how jets refuel midair, called a flying boom system. A tanker aircraft releases a fuel hose that remotely connects to a jet flying behind and below the plane. To retrieve the Gremlins the host aircraft will release a tether below it’s body, either from the cargo bay or the underside of the wings, until it reaches a distance safely out of turbulence zone. The tether will then remotely connect with the Gremlins. Once the Gremlins power down they are reeled and docked back into the pylons.

This past November DARPA ran it’s first full Gremlins trial. The purpose of this trial was to test the drone’s flight capabilities. The test was conducted at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah, launching a Gremlins from a C-130 Hercules transport aircraft. The drone proved that it’s launching and flight platform worked as planned as it completed a 1 hour and 41 minutes flight. Tim Keeter, who managed this program from the Dynetics team, said of the trial, “It gives us a lot of confidence going forward that this vehicle can fly where it’s supposed to fly, how it’s supposed to fly. Now the team can be principally focused on the other portion of our program plan, which is to successfully rendezvous with a C-130, dock with our docking system and safely recover the vehicle.” Though the flight portion of trail went smoothly, the landing was a failure. As this drone is intended to be retrieved in air it does not have landing gear, rather a series of parachutes to assist in a safe landing. One of the parachutes experienced a mechanical failure so the drone crashed to the ground and was destroyed.

Though DARPA would have most likely preferred not to have lost one of the Gremlins, they still saw this trail as a great success. The parachute malfunction is something they feel they can easily sort out. Now they are preparing for the next round of trials to take place late this coming spring. The next round of trials will test the retrieval procedure. DARPA said that their goal for the test is to retrieve 4 Gremlins into a C-130 within 30 minutes. Proving that these drones can be used for multiple missions while saving the military time and money. DARPA’s Gremlins program manager, Scott Wierzbanowski, stated, “If I have an expendable vehicle, at some point I’m not going to want to be able to use those things because they’re just too expensive. But if I can recover them and then amortize the cost of that vehicle over 10 or 20 or 30 sorties, maybe there’s a bend in the curve somewhere that really will allow us to benefit from these smaller, more affordable, attributable systems.”