An aircraft that will serve as a drone docking station to launch and recover fleets of drones may soon be available to the U.S. military. The Pentagon is partnering with private technology companies to make this vision a reality.  Last month, DARPA, the Pentagon’s ­advanced research and development team gave out a $38.6 million contract to a Huntsville company known as Dynetica.

Dynetics is going to work on the technology while another company Kratos, (San Diego-based) will provide inexpensive drones for target practice. Kratos will also develop a new type of drone especially for this purpose with wings that can be folded up for storage inside a plane.  For the military, having the ability to launch several drones from a plane is a quick and reliable way to deploy swarms of small drones to any battlefield.

A chief engineer at Dynetics, Tim Keeter stated that hordes of drones can be deployed over and over again. This will help overwhelm the enemy and could be the future of military strategy.  Another important factor is the low cost of deployment which will enable the military to channel its resources toward other important projects.

Since the commercialization of drones, some technology companies have shown their expertise in managing swarms of drones and carrying out remarkably complex aerial tasks. In the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea, an aerial drone display created by Intel was the highlight of the event.

The program is covertly known as “Gremlins,” and requires both companies to show that they can launch drones safely and reliably as well as recover them without any hassles.  Now that the technical designs for flight and other complex issues like the sensor systems have been created, the companies are focusing on the software that will enable safe takeoff and landings.  Dynetics has already demonstrated the way its system works with a test run that was successfully launched off the wing of an aircraft (even though the drone later crashed to the ground).

They also demonstrated how the recovery system will work by launching another test drone from the aircraft and later pulling it back into the plane.  For some time now, the U.S. military has been exploring the notion of airborne aircraft carriers. Back in the 1930s, the Navy successfully launched small aircraft from a helium-filled airship and tests were abandoned after a series of accidents. But now, almost a century later, the military believes that drones are an ideal machine for this purpose.