US Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) intends to recompete the Medium Aerial Resupply Vehicle Expeditionary Logistics (MARV-EL) programme, meant to result in a vertical take-off unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that could move up to 600 lb (272.1 kg) of cargo as far as 25 n miles (46 km).A fly-off, held in July 2024 at Yuma Proving Grounds, Arizona, found that neither of the two contestants could satisfy US Marine Corps (USMC) requirements for the system.Greg Skinner, NAVAIR programme manager for small tactical UAVs, told a crowd at Modern Day Marine 2025 in Washington, DC, on 29 April that neither of the two contestants Kamans Kargo or a Leidos-Elroy Air SeaOnyx satisfactorily fulfilled the demonstration tasks assigned to them.Skinner placed the underlying technology into three buckets: system architecture, autonomy, and airframe.What weve learnt in prototyping there is that we need to continue to accelerate certain technologies as far as architecture and autonomy, Skinner said.
We are continuing to do that, and then were also continuing to go and refine requirements so that we can go back out and integrate a payload.Skinner stressed that system architecture and autonomy were demonstrated satisfactorily, but that the airframes involved did not perform to standards.Were continuing with the architecture and the autonomy, and then were just kind of reviewing the requirements based on the prototyping competitions that we had over the [boreal] summer, Skinner said.The service is using a smaller UAV, Survice Engineerings TRV-150C, as a surrogate to test architecture, autonomy, and communications technologies for MARV-EL.Photo: The first Kaman Kargo prototype in flight-testing at an undisclosed Pennsylvania site.
(Kaman)Source: Janes