Why Drone as First Responder Needs a Fixed-Wing
Adam Bry 
There's not a single perfect form factor for Drone as First Responder for every agency, which is why we're building a whole family of flying robots.
X10 is the DFR market leader because it’s versatile, super reliable, super easy to operate, small, quiet, and safe. The mid-size quadcopter will prove unbeatable as the everyday workhorse, and it will keep getting better through SW and HW improvements.
R10 is the indoor extension of DFR.
But sometimes you need to fly very fast or stay in the air for hours. The bad (but seemingly popular) answer for this is a giant quadcopter. The right answer is a fixed-wing aircraft.
F10, which we announced seven months ago, is the long-range, long-endurance, high-speed beast for the agencies covering large land areas or that want to eliminate dangerous ground vehicle pursuits. A wing is fundamentally (obviously) the right architecture for this, and F10, with 100mph top speed and >90 minute endurance, easily out-specs its giant-quadcopter-would-be-competitors. It’s just very hard to make it dock autonomously and easy to operate for a single (or no) pilot.
But we are making it work. Public, live demonstrations of F10 from last year are already well beyond the (mostly CGI) launch videos of its competitors. And we have made *a lot* of progress since then. F10 builds on a mature technology foundation, and it’s coming in hot at 100mph. It will blow people’s minds when the full product is unveiled.
By the way, we’re hiring. Come build it.
