Noctara completes first fully autonomous flight of Umbra demonstrator

GOA, India. Noctara today announced that its NX-1 Umbra demonstrator has completed its first fully autonomous flight. The aircraft taxied, took off, flew a pre-planned surveillance pattern, responded to a simulated loss of satellite navigation and landed without operator input.

The 40-minute sortie was the first flight of the Noctis autonomy stack on a jet-powered airframe. Noctis has previously flown on the company's Nyx and Vesper platforms.

During the flight, the test team injected a simulated GNSS outage. Umbra transitioned to vision-based navigation, completed its pattern within planned tolerances and re-acquired satellite navigation on cue.

Umbra is Noctara's collaborative combat aircraft, designed to fly alongside crewed fighters and to be built in India at a cost that allows it to be fielded in numbers. Further flight testing will expand the envelope and introduce formation flying with a second airframe later this year.