How LeVanta Tech's HALIA gets off the water

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How LeVanta Tech’s HALIA gets off the water

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LeVanta Tech, a defence startup based in Diamondhead, Mississippi, is building HALIA, an uncrewed aircraft that floats motors-off on the open sea, then lifts itself onto three hydrofoils, skates across the surface and takes off without a runway or a catapult. The company says its prototype has demonstrated float, take-off, flight and water landing, with the float-to-airborne transition done in under 60 seconds, while figures such as 30 days on station and 120 nautical miles of range remain modelled targets. It is funded by US Air Force and Navy SBIR Phase II contracts and is covered by a memorandum of understanding signed with Ukraine’s defence industry in October 2025.

A drone that floats on the open ocean for weeks with its motors off, barely a foot of it showing above the water.

Then it stands up, skates across the surface, and flies away. This is HALIA, from the American startup LeVanta Tech.

The gap it is built for is real. Aerial drones reach a patch of ocean fast, then run out of endurance in hours. Surface drones can stay for months, but they crawl there at boat speed.

HALIA tries to do both, and the trick is in its feet.

It rests on three hydrofoils. When it is time to move, air is pushed down into those foils, the hull lifts clear, and it skates until it has flying speed.

Float, skate, fly, then land back on the water.

LeVanta has a prototype in the water, and says float to airborne has been demonstrated in under sixty seconds.

The rest are engineering targets. Thirty days on station, a hundred miles an hour, a hundred and twenty nautical miles of range, eighteen pounds of payload.

The mission being pitched is submarine hunting. Land, lower a sonar from the belly, listen, relay, then relaunch and get ahead of the contact, rather than dropping sonobuoys that expire where they fall.

Air Force and Navy SBIR contracts are funding it, and Ukraine signed on last October to test it.

2 months ago

AI and Robotics

How LeVanta Tech's HALIA gets off the water

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