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Airbus Begins Flight Testing Its VSR700 Optionally Piloted UAV

By Matthew Beinart

Wednesday, June 21st, 2017

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Airbus has begun autonomous flight tests of its VSR700 Optionally Piloted Vehicle (OPV) demonstrator, setting up the possibility of flying the first completed prototype in 2018.The recent flight tests used a safety pilot to focus on refining the Airbus aircraft’s automatic flight control system used on their OPV’s, with the end goal of testing out future fully autonomous flights without a safety pilot.The VSR700 is a light military rotary-wing tactical unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), which has been jointly developed by…

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