Sagitta.

A quadcopter is a hover machine. It is excellent in a small box of air, and merely adequate at moving through the world. The work that conservation biologists, coastline surveyors, and corridor inspectors do is the opposite — they need to cover ground, and they need to do it for hours.

Sagitta is the answer to a different question than Corvus. What does a long-range drone look like if you build it from a bamboo culm and a walnut plank, and you measure success in kilometres rather than minutes?

The answer is a tailless delta. No rotor, no folding arm, no battery dump for hover thrust. Just a low-drag lifting body, a single quiet pusher motor, and enough wing area to carry itself slowly and patiently across a hundred kilometres of forest, river, or coastline on a charge.

The wing skin is split bamboo — strips planed from a single moso culm, edge-glued into a continuous sheet, then heat-formed over a mould to take the cambered profile of the airfoil. Bamboo's grain runs span-wise across the wing, where the bending stress is, exactly as it does in Corvus's beam.

The leading edge is a single piece of black walnut, machined in one pass from a billet sized to match the planform. It carries the forward spar load and absorbs bird-strike and ground-handling impacts that would shatter a hollow composite leading edge.

Twin elevons on a flexure hinge

Sagitta has no rudder and no separate elevator. The two trailing-edge elevons act as both — coupled symmetrically for pitch, antisymmetrically for roll. The hinge is the same compliant bamboo flexure that drives Ornitos, scaled down. There is no metal pin, no bearing, and nothing to seize. The flexure is a wear part, sized for several thousand cycles.

The pusher, and why

The motor is a single 320 KV brushless turning a folding 13-inch carbon prop, mounted at the trailing edge centreline. A pusher places the propeller in undisturbed air aft of the wing, which is quieter, slightly more efficient, and keeps the nose clear for a payload bay and a forward-facing camera. The prop folds along the spine on launch and on landing, so the platform can be belly-landed on grass or sand without breaking blades.

Sagitta was designed for distance. The use cases that informed it:

• corridor survey Pipeline, transmission, road, and rail inspection — out, scan, return on a single charge.
• coastline patrol Anti-poaching, fisheries, coastal mapping, marine-mammal counts at altitude.
• forest traverse Treetop multispectral survey across stands a quadcopter would need a relay to reach.
• sensor relay Ferry payloads, drop low-power loggers, pick up data from remote sensor sites.
• disaster reconnaissance Wide-area damage assessment after fire, flood, or storm — silent and with a payload bay sized for a small comms package.

Sagitta is not for tight spaces. It cannot land on a roof, hover over a single tree, or operate in a closed canopy. For those jobs, fly Corvus. The two are designed to complement each other; many operators will run a fleet of both.

Prototype I is in flight test on a coastal conservation contract — short hops to validate the airframe, then longer corridor flights through the autumn. We expect to open a small early-customer program in MMXXVII once the wing-flexure cycle life is characterised under sustained operational use.

If you have a route that a 30-minute drone cannot fly and a helicopter is overkill for, write to the workshop. We are allocating early Sagittas by use case, not queue order.

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