The US Air Force is moving closer to realizing its vision of low-cost surveillance drones with an autonomous drone that can fly for more than three days at a time. And he is already carrying out missions in the Middle East.
The Ultra Long-Endurance Tactical Reconnaissance Aircraft, or ULTRA, operated in the shadows until US Central Command inadvertently revealed in May that the drone had been deployed in the Middle East by posting pictures of it at Al Dhafra Air Base in the United Arab Emirates .
Developed by drone maker DZYNE Technologies in conjunction with the Air Force Research Laboratory, ULTRA promises a “new chapter” for the services as they move away from expensive, legacy ISR aircraft, the company said. Before the drone footage was released, DZYNE remained tight-lipped about its long-endurance programs because it worked directly with fighters on “active missions,” said Matt McCue, DZYNE’s CEO.
“The business was built by really working with the end users. We were brought into normally protected, classified environments, they were talking about a need that they couldn’t get from industry, and we were putting together a program for them and helping them solve a problem,” McCue said Defense one.
The Air Force formally began buying ULTRA, which began under the Defense Department’s Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, in the 2025 budget request and asked to buy four drones for $35 million, according to budget documents . The program was developed from the DZYNE Long Endurance Aircraft Program, or LEAP, McCue said, a previously secret autonomous aircraft deployed since 2016 that can fly for up to 40 hours.
The glider-like ULTRA drone can stay in the air for 80 hours without recharging or landing and can carry payloads weighing up to 400 pounds. The ULTRA costs a fraction of the cost of a legacy surveillance aircraft, DZYNE says, such as the General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper, which costs roughly $30 million apiece.
“This is an example of a solution we provided to our customers for an urgent need when they simply couldn’t afford the price they were getting from General Atomics or Northrop Grumman for some of their more sophisticated technologies,” McCue said.
The development of ULTRA comes as the Air Force looks to fill some of its intelligence gaps with low-cost, stealthy ISR drones. The MQ-9 has been used for surveillance in the Middle East since entering service in 2008, but is now viewed by the Air Force as too expensive and vulnerable. Multiple MQ-9s have been shot down in the Middle East over the past year, reinforcing critics’ argument that it is unsustainable to fly an aircraft at this cost in a contested environment.
“Having aircraft that are almost an order of magnitude cheaper or less expensive, but still very capable and with more endurance and more capabilities, it made the government have a strong value proposition to not have to use the status quo and continue to pay the prices they have,” McCue said.
The MQ-9 Reaper was developed as a strike aircraft, but only a “single-digit percentage” of surveillance missions required a strike capability, McCue said, so the Pentagon realized it didn’t need to fly a Ferrari when it could just use “pickup” and essentially load it up with a bunch of sensors.
DZYNE was able to keep ULTRA costs low by using commercially available parts, McCue said, rather than relying on custom manufacturing. According to the AFRL, the company is converting a “commercial sport gilder that was previously piloted” into a military drone.
Demand for more surveillance in the Middle East has increased since the Israel-Hamas war sparked a regional crisis last fall. And in Africa, the US recently announced that its troops were leaving Niger, which had been used as a key base for surveillance operations in the region.
But with ULTRA’s long-endurance capability, McCue said the U.S. military could fly the drone from Sigonella, Italy, for example, and still fly missions over Africa. This will allow the US military to fly over “multiple COCOMs from one location, which is not something that has been available to commanders before.”
“Part of why ULTRA is unique is that it provides mission flexibility to users given this very challenging time that we’re having with recent withdrawals over the last few years from certain countries and some large cases that are ongoing and sensitive to US national security interests,” McCue said.
Beyond the Middle East, DZYNE sees the drone as optimally suited for long-duration missions in the Indo-Pacific, where basing options are limited. ULTRA can hang around for a day over a target after flying more than 2,000 miles, McCue said.
“Especially for these upcoming, urgent areas like INDOPACOM, where you have the tyranny of the distance between bases that are thousands of miles, hundreds of thousands of miles apart that most aircraft and assets are not useful, an asset like this is very, very powerful for these types of theaters because they are high reach areas,” he said.
