82 The DroneX trade show and conference returned to the ExCeL in the London Docklands in September this year, bringing with it around 200 exhibitors and 100 speakers dedicated to showcasing and discussing the latest in uncrewed aerial technology advances. This year’s event was co-located with Helitech Expo and Advanced Air Mobility Expo, with many companies exhibiting mission-critical solutions for vehicle engineering for uncrewed, crewed and optionally piloted systems. Among the new UAVs and components for commercial, defence and emergency services applications were a wide variety of innovations across aircraft designs, propulsion and avionics, about which follow some first-hand details. MGI Engineering attended the show to unveil two UAVs it has designed and manufactured in-house. The company was founded as an engineering consultancy by Mike Gascoyne, a former Formula One designer and engineer for various teams. “Since our founding of Lotus Racing [subsequently renamed Team Lotus] in 2010, we’ve concentrated a growing amount of our r&d on VTOL aircraft engineering, combining that with our knowledge of aerodynamics, lightweight materials, and CFD modelling and FEA tools from Formula One to make the two UAVs, which we’ve named the Mosquito family,” said Fraser Harris. “Both UAVs have the same body, but one is built with a tilt-wing design for fixed-wing flight and VTOL transitioning, the other has fixed rotors for a multicopter configuration.” The Mosquito Tiltwing has two pairs of tilting wings – one forward, one rearward – each of which has two motor-propeller drives, for a total of eight across the aircraft. The Mosquito Fixed-Rotor also has eight motor-propellers, but its drives are distributed on four tilting rotor arms, a coaxial motor-prop pair integrated at the end of each arm, in an X4 coaxial quadcopter architecture. Both UAVs have a payload capacity and empty weight of 20 kg, and are configured to run with batteries. MGI aims to supply the aircraft for cargo Rory Jackson presents his pick of the products on offer at this year’s trade show for UAV professionals Aerial perspective MGI Engineering’s Mosquito UAVs, along with a Formula car from CEO Mike Gascoyne’s earlier days December/January 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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