Highest wind speed recorded by an uncrewed aircraft

The highest wind-speed measured by an uncrewed aircraft in a hurricane is 387.75 km/h (240.94 mph), measured at an altitude of 494.9 m (1,623 ft) by a Black Swift S0 sUAS (small uncrewed air system) which flew into the eyewall of Hurricane Milton, at the time a Category 5 storm, on 8 October 2024. The air-deployed variant of the S0 is the result of a collaboration between Black Swift and NOAA (both USA). It was deployed into the storm by an NOAA Hurricane Hunter aircraft as it passed through the central Gulf of Mexico, north of the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico.

The Black Swift S0 was deployed from a pneumatic tube that launched it through the bottom of the fuselage of an NOAA WP-3D Orion as it flew close to the hurricane. These tubes were designed to deploy parachute-borne "dropsondes" and have a diameter of 6 in (15.2 cm) and a length of 3 ft (91 cm), this means that any air-deployed drone has to be packed into cylinder and then unfold itself in flight.

The S0 is a small, 2.75-lb (1.25-kg) twin-propellor aircraft, with folding wings that extend to a deployed wingspan of 3 ft (91.4 cm) on launch. It carries instruments to measure wind-speed, temperature, barometric pressure, humidity and magnetic fields, as well as an accelerometer and gyroscope. Impressively, the S0 is around a tenth of the size of the previous holder, the Altius 600.

The key advantage of powered UAS is that they allow for the collection of continuous observations from inside a storm. Before these drones were an option, NOAA scientists had to rely on dropsondes (small packages of sensors that are dropped into the storm) but these provided only a momentary snapshot of conditions at different altitudes as they plummeted down to the surface.