Xwing, a company developing technology for autonomous flight operations, last Friday said it recently flew unmanned dispersed cargo missions in unrestricted airspace for the Air Force as part of the service’s recent AGILE FLAG 24-1 exercise.
Xwing received a Military Flight Release (MFR) from the Air Force for the week-long exercise that began in late January in California and entailed 2,800 miles of human-supervised autonomous flight and 22 hours of flight time between eight public and military airports. The MFR was the first for a contractor-owned and operated public aircraft operation in unrestricted airspace granted by service’s AFWERX Autonomy Prime program, Xwing said.
Air Combat Command’s bi-annual AGILE FLAG is used to certify the command’s lead wings and test their ability to generate combat airpower and related sustainment for what the Air Force calls Agile Combat Employment (ACE). The airports Xwing’s Cessna 208B aircraft flew between locations that included Mach Air Reserve Base, Vandenberg Space Force Base, Sacramento McClellan Airport, Meadows Field Airport, and Fresno Yosemite International.
“AGILE FLAG demonstrations were a success and exercise leadership was supportive in leveraging our autonomous cargo logistics and offered multiple opportunities to support cargo movements between exercise locations which generated interest from the operational end-users and headquarters personnel,” Kate Brown, AFWERX Autonomy Prime deputy branch chief, said in a statement. “We’re starting to see a shift in the conversation of how the Department of the Air Force can supplement traditional logistics concepts with autonomous cargo aircraft.”
Xwing said it delivered “sensitive weather equipment” and other cargo to different locations and demonstrated faster distribution and fewer requests for traditional heavy lift aircraft.
“We saw first-hand during AGILE FLAG that the use of Xwing’s autonomous aircraft eliminated the need to fly a larger aircraft such as a C-130 to deliver critical cargo to the warfighter on short notice,” Maxime Gariel, president, chief technology officer, and co-founder of Xwing, said in a statement. “When you fly missions autonomously, you operate with the speed and efficiency required for dispersed ACE operations, delivering cargo and personnel at a much lower cost and risk.”
Xwing’s participation in the exercise was part $700,000 Phase III Small Business Innovation Research contract in December 2023. The company received a Phase II contract from AFWERX last May.
Xwing has developed Superpilot, an autonomous flight system for gate-to-gate operations with human supervision. Before a mission, the remote supervisor, who for AGILE FLAG was based at the airport in Sacramento, validates the auto-generated and path-optimized flight plan. During flight, the aircraft’s detect and avoid system monitors for other aircraft and displays the information to the remote supervisor, who handled all communication with air traffic control and other aircraft.
Xwing said that if there is a conflict with other traffic, its system calculates a new plan which goes to the supervisor for approval.
“After the completion of this test phase, the system will no longer require remote supervisor approval and will autonomously avoid other traffic,” Xwing said.
AFWERX’s Brown said there will be more testing ahead as her group demonstrates the use of autonomy and light cargo logistics for ACE.
“Moving forward, Autonomy Prime is continuing to investigate integration into future exercises to further refine concept of operations and use case,” she said. “In parallel, Autonomy Prime is working with requirements owners and vendors to inform future requirements.”