Aerolane was started to answer a big question: how far can the savings from precision gliding behind a lead plane get? And can the aerodynamics of this operation be scaled with larger planes and across normal flight operations?
Aerolane’s founding team pulls from decades of experience building and certifying new aviation concepts. We understood that concepts are nice, but that flight hours are what matter.
In close coordination with the FAA, Aerolane began flight tests on a series of aircraft-to-glider conversions. Almost immediately, skilled piloting of the gliders produced major fuel burn reductions.
As Aerolane began evaluating the interactions between the tow plane and the towed glider, a host of discrete challenges appeared. One example: generally speaking, the closer together the planes, the higher the chance that operations may yield dramatic efficiency gains. But close following yields greater potential for unstable flight dynamics in the glider.
With proprietary tooling and instrumentation, Aerolane’s team is compiling a large and growing dataset covering all the complex dynamics of tightly paired flight. This is the basis for the development of Aerolane’s proprietary glider autopilot technologies.