Texas Parks and Wildlife Department State Fire Program Leader Chris Schenck announced this month that they had celebrated their first operational mission with unmanned R-372PW (Hans) with IGNIS 2 on August 25th.

The Department is still in the early stages of the FAA Demonstration Phase for their Part 137 certificate.

Chris said: “We flew both autonomous and manual missions with no issues. We fired the interior of a 500+ acre unit, delivering 520 dragon eggs spaced 75 feet apart in 2 missions totaling 28 minutes. This would have been 5-7 miles walking in 96F temps.”