Skip to main content

This quadcopter is a ‘flying battery’ that can stay in the sky for 2 hours

Impossible US-1 First Look

A big annoyance for drone owners is the limited amount of time you can keep your bird in the sky before the juice runs out.

Many of today’s remotely controlled copters can only stay in the sky for around 30 minutes tops, so buying a couple of extra batteries is a necessity for most pilots when they order their machine.

But Impossible Aerospace says it can change all that.

Impossible Aerospace

The Sunnyvale, California-based startup on Monday, September 10 announced a battery-powered quadcopter capable of staying in the sky for up to two hours on a single charge, or 78 minutes with a 3-pound payload.

Designed by experienced engineers from the likes of Tesla and SpaceX, the US-1 drone is, in simple terms, a battery with propellors. Indeed, the “battery-first” approach was key in the machine’s development.

“The US-1 is more than just a drone — it’s the first aircraft designed properly from the ground up to be electric, using existing battery cells without compromise,” Spencer Gore, CEO of Impossible Aerospace, said in a release. “It’s not so much an aircraft as it is a flying battery, leveraging an energy source that doubles as its primary structure.”

The CEO said this is how electric aircraft will need to be built if they’re to compete with conventional designs and displace petroleum fuels in aviation. Gore hinted at plans to incorporate the technology into larger aircraft, a move that could result in a major shift in the aviation industry.

The US-1 drone

With its 26-inch frame, the US-1 has a top speed of 42 mph and tips the scales at at a hefty 15.7 pounds, making it about five times heavier than DJI’s Phantom 4 Pro — not all that surprising considering its larger lithium-ion battery.

Impossible Aerospace, which was founded in 2016, is aiming its machine at the commercial market and says it has already received orders from firefighters, police departments, and search and rescue teams. Important extras such as optical and thermal sensors are also part of the US-1’s package, and delivery to customers is expected later this year.

A bonus for companies with concerns about privacy and national security issues is that the US-1 will be engineered and assembled entirely in the U.S.

But at $7,500 for the basic model, the drone doesn’t come cheap. Whether potential customers will be attracted by the US-1’s extended flight time over, say, DJI’s Inspire 2, which offers 27 minutes of flight time at less than half the cost, could be key to the drone’s success.

Editors' Recommendations

Trevor Mogg
Contributing Editor
Not so many moons ago, Trevor moved from one tea-loving island nation that drives on the left (Britain) to another (Japan)…
MIT’s new drone can hover like a quadcopter, soar like a plane
best drones under 100 parrot swing

Whether it’s in science fiction movies or according to the reported sightings of members of the general public, one repeated claim about so-called flying saucers is that they possess an extraordinary degree of maneuverability. One moment they could be hovering, the next moving rapidly vertically and, the next, speeding horizontally like a jet plane. It’s a movement that screams "alien presence" because, frankly, no earthbound vehicle is capable of pulling off such feats.

Of course, that’s exactly the kind of thing that sounds like a challenge to the researchers at MIT’s renowned Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). They have designed a new type of drone which can turn on a dime from hovering like an ordinary quadcopter to swooping and gliding like a fixed-wing airplane. In doing so, they may just have solved solve some of the biggest challenges which exist with modern drones.

Read more
This compact drone gun can down a rogue quadcopter at 500 meters
this compact drone gun can down a rogue quadcopter at 500 meters dronegun mkiii  1

An unprecedented drone incident at one of the world’s busiest airports in December 2018 led to flights being suspended for around 36 hours, which in turn resulted in ruined travel plans for around 140,000 people as well as huge costs for the airport operator and affected airlines.

The problem of rogue drone flights near sensitive locations such as airports and prisons is a growing headache for governments around the world, though slowly but surely various solutions are being designed to combat the illegal flight incursions.

Read more
This AI cloned my voice using just three minutes of audio
acapela group voice cloning ad

There's a scene in Mission Impossible 3 that you might recall. In it, our hero Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) tackles the movie's villain, holds him at gunpoint, and forces him to read a bizarre series of sentences aloud.

"The pleasure of Busby's company is what I most enjoy," he reluctantly reads. "He put a tack on Miss Yancy's chair, and she called him a horrible boy. At the end of the month, he was flinging two kittens across the width of the room ..."

Read more