Northwest UAV (NWUAV) has announced that its NW-44 Multi-Fuel Engine has flown more than 10,000 combat flight hours and logged more than 1000 flights.

The NW-44 Engine was built specifically for small UAS that require extreme endurance and high reliability. The lightweight, multi-fuel UAS engine has been designed and built to be easily adaptable so that it can meet the most challenging mission requirements.

Described as a “complete turn-key engine system” designed to be the Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) platform that virtually eliminates development costs for the OEM, the NW-44 saves customers millions of dollars, as well as several years stuck in the engineering development cycle, NWUAV says. The company adds that the engine fills a niche in the UAS marketplace, as it supports aircraft weighing between 40 and 80 pounds.

The NW-44 Engine is for the Tier II UAS sector, but NWUAV notes that it is still cost competitive with hobby grade systems on a cost-per-flight-hour basis.

“The engine core is critical to reliability, but it’s just a portion of the overall cost of the entire engine system. This is true whether it’s a hobby engine or a purpose-built engine,” explains Chris Harris – president and owner of NWUAV.

“Since we can overhaul the NW-44 multiple times, it spreads out the cost of our engine system over a thousand or more flight hours. It is understandable why companies seeking to minimize development costs have decided to use hobby grade engines in the past. However, once systems reach a decent level of maturity, companies are often are forced to redesign their systems due to inconsistent quality, or parts that go obsolete with little notice, which is commonplace in the hobby engine industry. Now that the NW-44 engine is an option, there is no reason to take those risks!”