Boeing’s drone sales soar higher and higher

Boeing‘s drone subsidiary Insitu was awarded more than $390 million to supply multiple Blackjack and ScanEagle drone systems for the US military and for foreign military sales. The Blackjack UAS can carry a payload of up to 39 lb and comes configured with an electro-optic imager, a mid-wave infrared imager, a laser rangefinder, and infra-red marker. The ScanEagle is a smaller UAS that is popular for foreign sales, having been sold to Lebanon in April and to Southeast Asia in June.

Boeing, the #1 patent holder in the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles sector, has an impressive patent portfolio that justifies its seemingly endless sales to the military. Insitu had a patent application published last week on the Fourth, directed to using image sensors to guide drones in the absence of global navigation information, which would be extremely useful in military applications.

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