The Flying Propeller: A Two-Hour Drone for First Responders

In this episode, the Roswell Flight Test Crew speaks with Dennis Krause, the Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder of Angel Aerial Systems. His company was at Commercial UAV Expo in September 2024 to promote the company’s fascinating new platform: the Trio. Developed specifically with public safety users in mind, the Trio takes off and lands like a tricopter but then, once airborne, turns into a “flying propeller.” The limbs supporting its three motors function as airfoils, allowing it to fly for two hours with an on-board battery capacity that would keep a conventional multirotor flying for 30 minutes. The Trio can fly for two hours, making it an ideal observation platform for first responders operating in tactical environments, such as firefighters and law enforcement.

[ddegn]

In case anyone reading isn't aware of Nicholas Rehm's channel, he built a similar drone a couple of years ago. Check out his video titled *"The Spinning Drone Paradox - Part 1"*

Nicholas points out how much more efficient the spinning drone is.

[NicholasRehm]

Very novel and outside the box thinking from the fine people at angel aerial systems. Like nothing I have ever seen before.
Surely such a flashy design with no regard for the challenges of station keeping in light wind with such a low disk loading / tip speed rotor will generate a lot of money!

[robertnastasi]

50 K Holy crap. Very cool but seems to have limited payloads. I saw one built in a garage for a couple of hundred.

[GudasWorld_]

Patrick! Good to see you ! Fire extinguishing drones guy Guda here. I've got a whole playlist on my main channel about fire-extinguishing drones. If we had made it in to Drones For Good, there would be no smoke in the

[olsonspeed]

Speaking as a former first responder; I found this drone to be a fantastic design for a multitude of incident scenarios where air to ground observation is desired. I do have some concerns as to the station keeping ability in windy conditions due the large surface area of the wing blades.

[uvkush]

beeing waiting for ur daily updates fromlong time

[GNARGNARHEAD]

why on God's grey Earth do they keep putting the props on the end of the wings with these designs, tip speed is going to be your biggest limitation, no?

not big on the gimballed camera either, solve it in software, you'd get all that situational awareness and save so much complexity

still cool to see a commercial version 👍