Over the last couple of weeks we’ve started looking at parachute recoveries for our UAV’s. The advantage of this is that a prepared runway (or road/track) is not required for landing. Combined with a hand-launched takeoff, we would be able to operate UAV’s from remote locations – giving us far more flexibility in our operations.
It will take a fair amount of testing and development to get a reliable and safe system, but given the first test above, it looks promising!