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The electric vertical take-off and landing developer Joby Aviation is partnering with defense contractor L3Harris Technologies to explore development of an optionally piloted, hybrid-electric VTOL aircraft for defense applications.
The collaboration is the latest evidence of the growing enthusiasm for defense technology within industry, government and investor circles, heavily influenced by the importance of small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and other autonomous platforms in the war in Ukraine. Lessons from Ukraine are also reflected in the missions that Joby and L3Harris are targeting, which according to Joby executive chairman Paul Sciarra include counter-UAS and electronic warfare as well as contested logistics.
Related: How Ukraine’s drone industry iterates at the speed of war
“One of the things that distinguishes the platform from others is that there is significant power [available] during loiter, so that allows for the use of a set of payloads that generally are only applicable for far larger platforms than the one we’re delivering,” Sciarra told The Air Current in an interview, referring to the S4 winged eVTOL that Joby is developing as a commercial air taxi. “And many of those are for counter-UAS applications, or for electronic warfare applications, so that felt like a really natural pairing against the platform capabilities.”
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