Join Us in Celebrating our 50th!
Today we begin the celebration of AeroVironment's 50th year. Today I reflect on all the incredible work our team has done over these decades to achieve the impossible and deliver compelling capabilities that make an important difference for our customers.
AeroVironment has always been years ahead of its time, playing an outsized role in pioneering innovations that ultimately produce incredible solutions for our customers today. In 1981, our Solar Challenger set the world record for the longest, highest, farthest solar-powered flight. We followed up in 1995 with the Pathfinder Plus and in 1999 with Helios, both unmanned solar-powered aircraft designed to attain extreme altitudes.
Forty years after Solar Challenger, we are pursuing an audacious plan with Softbank Corp, the Japanese telecom operator, to deploy a broadband network comprising a multitude of solar-powered high-altitude platform stations (HAPS) that builds on these achievements.
In 1986, the company's engineers created the Pointer, a hand-launched, battery-powered unmanned aircraft equipped with cameras that streamed live video and data back to its operators. Today, its successor, the Raven, is among the most widely deployed unmanned aircraft system in the world, used in every branch of the U.S. military and, in concert with AeroVironment's Puma™ AE and Wasp® AE, the militaries of more than 50 allied governments.
These are just a few of the areas over the past 50 years where AeroVironment leapt ahead into the future to define entirely new categories. It is thanks to this record of visionary innovation and incredibly talented employees that AeroVironment has achieved the stature we have today.
I thank every member of our team for your resilience, commitment and incredible talent. Thank you to our customers who continue to select AeroVironment and rely on our leading and proven solutions. Thank you to our shareholders for your confidence in our team, our strategy and our future.
We are excited about the opportunities ahead to extend our track record of value creation, innovation and success.