Standing amid a grove of pepper plants in Thousand Oaks last week, Christopher Thompson revved up his plane’s tiny 6-inch propeller and gently tossed it into the sky, much as weekend hobbyists fly their airborne toys.
But this mini-aircraft called the Raven, weighing slightly more than four pounds and painted in Army gray, is no ordinary model.
It is actually a tiny U.S. military spy plane that can hover quietly 500 feet in the air and transmit video images to operators several miles away. These Simi Valley-made planes are providing vital information to ground combat soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who want to know what’s happening over the ridge and around the bend.
“It served us well,” said Thompson, a private first class with the Army National Guard as he demonstrated how his unit used the Raven in Afghanistan. There the aircraft helped his platoon avoid enemy ambushes and pinpoint the location of insurgent mortar fires. “It’s an essential part of what we do in the Army now,” he said.
These unmanned planes have quickly become a mainstay of U.S. military operations and are helping propel the growth of a once-tiny company that until recently was better known for its gangly, pedal-powered planes.
The aircraft is not only popular at the Pentagon, but its manufacturer has caught the attention of investors.
AeroVironment, the small company with headquarters in Monrovia, near Los Angeles, recently has become the darling of Wall Street, where investors have been driving up the stock price to all-time highs. The stock has risen more than 50 percent since March.
The Raven, with a wingspan of 41/2 feet, and its smaller one-pound Wasp are fitted with cameras that transmit live-video images of what’s ahead. Founded by the late aviation pioneer Paul B. MacCready, the company launched its ambitions with attempts to win a much-needed $100,000 prize for the first human-powered airplane. It won the prize with Gossamer Conder, which hangs at the National Air and Space Museum. But quietly in the back room, engineers also were dabbling in a new frontier in aviation — making planes ever smaller and closer in design to small birds and insects.
All that research paid off after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks as the Pentagon began to look for ways to protect U.S. troops from elusive insurgents. With orders for its unmanned planes rising steadily, AeroVironment went public early last year.
