Textron Systems flew an Aerosonde Mk. 4.7 drone nearly 150 nautical miles between two Virginia vertiports, the company said on 22 September. The trip took two and a half hours.
The drone took off from a vertiport at the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute in Blacksburg. It landed at Textron’s Aerosonde Center of Excellence in Blackstone, its training and logistics hub for the aircraft. The route ran through commercial airspace.
Textron calls it the first uncrewed aircraft flight in commercial airspace to use vertiports at both ends. It has not said when the flight took place.
A military drone in a civil test
The Aerosonde is built for military work. Textron says it has flown more than 750,000 hours on missions from surveillance to electronic warfare. The Mk. 4.7 uses four lift rotors to take off and land, then flies on its wing.
The flight served a state research program. Virginia Tech’s Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership, one of seven FAA-designated drone test sites, has run the Virginia Advanced Air Mobility Smart Airspace Program since March 2025. The Virginia Department of Aviation and a state aviation lab pay for it.
The program is meant for electric and hybrid-electric aircraft carrying people and cargo. Its job is to write instrument procedures, so those aircraft can use small vertiports in cloud and under air traffic control. Tombo Jones, the partnership’s director, said in 2025 that the network would be “like a highway for aircraft”. A third vertiport is planned at Roanoke-Blacksburg Regional Airport, which has a control tower.
The Aerosonde has done this job before. It flew the tests behind the Blackstone vertiport. In September 2023 the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation announced that the site had won the FAA’s first conditional approval for a vertiport.
