Diminutive, and squat on its four lunar-lander legs, a Flexrotor spins-up its outsize rotor and levitates into the hot, high desert twilight. As it disappears into the darkness, its legs join into a trim rear fuselage, its broad wings take over, and the rotor slows to a flickering idle for a long, efficient cruise until dawn. It comes back to base as daylight breaks over the horizon, hovers down to a gentle landing, and is stowed snugly in its coffin-size box – until, at the next sunset, the time comes to rise again.

This performance, otherworldly for the uninitiated, has become a matter of routine for staff from Precision Integrated (Newburg, Oregon) completing their 4th straight month of near-nightly operations. Many more months are to come. Precision’s Matt Parker marked the milestone by observing that “we saw early on that Flexrotor’s combination of small footprint and long endurance put it in a class by itself. We’ve used it for shipboard reconnaissance, in the high Arctic and on the high seas, which just wouldn’t be practical with any other aircraft. Now we’re setting a new standard in the high desert. We show up with a few boxes and a couple of guys, ready to operate for months on end. It’s hot and it’s high, with density altitude usually over 6000 ft through the summer, and we fly night after night, all night, getting imagery to our customer which can’t be obtained any other way.”

An early-production Aerovel Flexrotor returns to its high-desert base after an all-night imaging mission. Near-nightly operations have been sustained since June. Aerovel is spooling up to meet demand as ongoing operations demonstrate the aircraft’s serviceability and effectiveness.

Aerovel’s Tad McGeer added that Precision’s desert operation is new for Flexrotor, “not only because it is hotter than we’ve seen before – even aboard ship in the tropical Pacific – and of course high to boot, but above all because it has built up tenfold more flying time than any Flexrotor deployment to date, over months rather than weeks. We thought that Aerovel would have to provide a lot of support, but it turns out that Precision’s crew has been doing fine without much help from us. They deserve a lot of credit for that. They only started training on Flexrotor at the beginning of the year, and on their first time out they have achieved effectiveness and serviceability at the level of a much more mature aircraft.” With its big rotor turning lazily in cruise, a Flexrotor flies formation to have its portrait captured by the imaging turret of a sister ship.