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At the Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona, Elroy Air will test the company’s Chaparral cargo aircraft’s ability, in collaboration with Leidos, to provide autonomous aerial resupply to the U.S. Marine Corps.
The Chaparral will demonstrate its capabilities as an autonomous Medium Aerial Resupply Vehicle – Expeditionary Logistics (MARV-EL) prototype, to meet the requirements of the Navy and Marine Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office (PMA-263).
The Chaparral is a “lift-plus-cruise” hybrid-electric vertical take-off and landing (hVTOL) cargo aircraft. The Chaparral system leverages the benefits of wing-borne flight driven by electric propulsion and turbo-generation for efficient autonomous operations and longer-range missions. It is designed with an advanced carbon composite airframe and modular automated payload capabilities to help reduce the personnel required versus legacy aircraft and enable zero-touch logistics.
MARV-EL is a PMA-263 effort designed to provide commanders with a responsive capability to sustain Marine Corps Forces conducting expeditionary advanced base and other distributed operations.
MARV-EL, using autonomous operations, should be the “middle-weight” unmanned logistics asset, providing combat sustainment to Marines when ground or manned aviation assets are unavailable due to threat, terrain, weather, or competing priorities.
Elroy Air CEO and co-founder Dave Merrill commented; “We’re excited to work with Leidos to provide these critical capabilities to U.S. and allied forces.
“We’ve been designing Chaparral from the beginning to move cargo and resupply troops in the battlespace without putting crews in harm’s way. We look forward to demonstrating these capabilities and working toward serving the U.S. Marine Corps’ goals for expeditionary logistics.”
Tim Freeman, Leidos senior vice president and Airborne Systems business area manager, added; “Leidos is pleased to team with Elroy Air to bring this critical capability to the warfighter.
“Approval to proceed to test is a major milestone and is the result of months of hard work by the team. We look forward to demonstrating how the Leidos and Elroy Air MARV-EL solution will help deliver a logistics advantage to the Marines and other branches of the military.”
The flight test activities are scheduled for July 2024. The development and testing are part of a contract awarded in 2023 to develop and demonstrate an uncrewed aircraft system (UAS) that can autonomously resupply forward-deployed ground forces for the U.S. Marine Corps.
