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68 T he Commercial UAV Expo Americas returned to the Westgate Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas for its fifth edition in October 2019. This latest iteration broke its previous records, with 260 exhibitor booths and more than 3100 industry professionals and delegates. Attendees were treated to live demonstrations of new UAVs and the latest solutions for aiding systems’ autonomy, flight endurance, lift capacity, connectivity and much more. Parallel Flight Technologies debuted the working prototype of its Parallel One heavy-lift UAS, a quadcopter aircraft powered by four two-stroke engines from Desert Aircraft (one on each arm) for 19 kW (25 hp) of continuous power output, enabling it to lift 34 kg of payload for up to an hour. “We’ve had some of the most severe fires on record in California since 2017, and we wanted to support firefighters in the field who were asking for unmanned logistics tools that could fly longer and lift far more than what was generally available,” explained Joshua Resnick. “A year of development resulted in what we call the Parallel Hybrid system, which involves using the four Desert Aircraft gasoline engines to power four electric motors, with some proprietary February/March 2020 | Unmanned Systems Technology Walking the aisles of this record-breaking show, Rory Jackson found plenty to interest unmanned technology providers What happened in Vegas The fifth annual Commercial UAV Expo Americas took place in October 2019 at the Westgate Hotel & Casino