How is it able to fly such long distance, without running out of fuel?
Drones for war = one way trip? It won’t be capable to return from a long journey right?
In: Engineering
They are incredibly lightweight and a well-designed craft needs surprisingly little fuel once it is in flight.
The commercial aircraft with the longest range is the Airbus A350 Ultra Long Range, and it can travel 11,000 mi on a single tank of fuel. Given that it is designed to be a passenger/cargo aircraft, a smaller aircraft designed for recon could conceivably travel even further.
The term “drone” can mean a lot of different things. Most people think it means quadcopters (helicopters with four rotors). But the more professional definition is unmanned flying vehicle. This definition includes RC airplanes. Airplanes use a lot less fuel then helicopters. Another thing people do not realize is that drones comes in any size. And these bigger drones can carry more fuel and cargo so they can bring bigger things longer distances.
Since you are mentioning drones for war some of these can be absolutely enormous. In fact the term “drone” was first used for converted fighter jets with RC receivers controlling them. Drones are used as cheap cruise missiles by using piston engines designed for small aircraft rather then fast jet engines and rocket engines. So you essentially have an unmanned 6 seat aircraft which instead of seats is filled with explosives and instead of a pilot they have just programmed the autopilot to crash into the target.
These aircraft drones have also been fitted with cameras, bomb bays and even machine guns and rockets. So they can fly to a combat zone and attack the ground without risking the life of the pilot, and then fly back and land.
What do you mean when you say drone, there is a wide variety of drone classifications
a global hawk drone can fly from la to Australia and back, so the next city over means nothing.
The mq-9 Reaper is a 20+ year old drone with a _publicly reported_ range of 1,200 miles. Newer drone and especially lighter ones for reconnaissance that don’t carry ordinance can have a much more increased range. So they can absolutely make round trips, but it really depends on the specific drone.
The Airbus A380 has the following specifications:
– Empty weight: 285,000 kg
– Max takeoff weight: 575,000 kg
– Max Fuel capacity: 254,000 kg
– Cargo, crew and passenger max weight = 36,000 kg
Max weights as a % of total weight:
– Aircraft: 50%
– Fuel: 44%
– C,C,P: 6%
The oldest military drone in use by the US military is the MQ-1 Predator, which first started being used in 1995.
Here are its specs:
– Empty weight: 513 kg
– Max weight: 1,020 kg
– Max fuel weight: 387 kg
– Payload max wright: 120 kg
Max weights as a % of total weight:
– Aircraft: 50%
– Fuel: 38%
– Payload: 12%
As you can see the vehicle itself makes up about half the weight in both cases. The aircraft has a larger fuel capacity likely due to needing a higher margin for error given passenger lives are involved. But even then the values are not drastically different. For the drone nearly 2/5 of the weight is fuel. The fuel tanks aren’t really that small.
Some military drones are large enough to carry a lot of fuel and are designed in a way to be very efficient (engines for endurance, typically are light, loiter at high altitudes which give less stress on the airframe). The RQ-4 Globalhawk for example can loiter for more than a day and is about as long as an F-16 but around 4,000 pounds lighter (compared to an F-16’s empty weight).
When considering the popular old Call of Duty famous War Drones like you would think of with the old Global Hawk (UAV) or Predator (Guided missile strike) they’re the same size or only slightly smaller than manned war planes, so there’s plenty of space for fuel.
For the mini-drones and man-thrown drones like quad copters, Ravens, and the first-person bombing drones you can see on combat footage sites those are even still large enough to stick the equivalent of a car battery inside. With how efficient and lightweight they are you don’t need hardly any effort to keep them airborne once they’re up.
The micro drones are the ones with just an hour or two of battery and those are only used for close in reconnaissance and aren’t typically weighed down with war gear.
[This article](https://www.aerospacemanufacturinganddesign.com/article/lockheed-martin-stalker-vxe-uas-completes-record-39-hour-flight/) demonstrates roughly how it is possible on smaller aircraft. Its merely a matter of scaling after that.
And if you mean specifically last generation low-cost kamikaze drones like Shahed-136 and other models, or Ukrainian Bobr, they are basically very large model planes made out of fibreglass, with a basically a very efficient scooter motor (it’s really good, very small two-stroke but gives like 50 horsepower), some good electronics to guide it (autonomously, it’s not controlled) and 50-100 kg of explosives. Yes, they can go for 1000 km. And cost just 30-40 thousand dollars.
> with small fuel tanks?
Military drones are often pictured in the air so you think they are quite small.
[Here’s a MQ-9 Reaper with people around it](https://root-nation.com/wp-content/webp-express/webp-images/doc-root/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/mq-9-reaper-0.jpg.webp)
[Same with a Global Hawk](https://www.defensenews.com/air/2024/02/29/northrop-grumman-modifying-global-hawk-drones-for-hypersonic-tests/)
[The Bayraktar TB-2 is](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bayraktar_TB2#/media/File:Bayraktar_TB2_at_2020_Victory_Parade_in_Baku.jpg)… yeah it’s kinda small as guided missile/bomber drones go, but even so its little sports aircraft engine still has a few hundred kilometers in it on one tank.
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