Business
Kazakhstan’s defence ministry has struck an agreement with its counterpart in Tel Aviv over the supply of Israeli-made unmanned air vehicles. No detail on the quantity or potential providers has been released, but Kazakhstan appears most interested in medium-altitude, long-endurance platforms such as the Israel Aerospace Industries Heron 1
Propulsion
The UK Ministry of Defence (MOD) has announced it has ordered a third, record-breaking, Zephyr-S Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), as part of a £13-million contract with Airbus Defence and Space (ADS). Zephyr-S is the latest version of a highly sophisticated series of ultra-lightweight UAVs, capable of flying up to 70,
Weapons Systems / Lasers
The Pentagon, which has put a lot of effort in recent years into developing laser weapons, is continuing with a program intended to mount high-powered lasers on manned and unmanned aircraft to defend against heat-seeking missiles. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has awarded Northrop Grumman a $10.4 million
Military
QinetiQ will provide the UK component of a multinational demonstration of unmanned and autonomous systems under a new contract with the Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl). The demonstration, dubbed Hell Bay 4, will see a variety of unmanned underwater, surface and air vehicles working co-operatively within a number of
Business
General Atomics - Aeronautical Systems Inc., Poway, California, has been awarded a $370,932,862 firm fixed-price, incentive firm contract for fiscal 2015 MQ-9 Reaper production. Contractor will provide 30 aircraft for fiscal 2015 MQ-9 Reaper production configuration aircraft. Work will be performed at Poway, California, and is expected to
Testing
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA ASI), has announced that through a contract with the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), it executed a missile tracking test as part of the Pacific Dragon (PD) exercise held June 26-28 off the coast of the Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) in Kauai, Hawaii. Pacific
Military
The rapid evolution of small unmanned air systems (sUAS) technologies is fuelling the exponential growth of the commercial drone sector, creating new asymmetric threats for warfighters. sUASs’ size and low cost enable novel concepts of employment that present challenges to current defense systems. These emerging irregular systems and concepts of
Military
Elbit Systems has developed the Skylark C, a new highly autonomous Mini Unmanned Aircraft System (Mini-UAS) specifically designed and built for maritime applications. Based on the Skylark I Mini UAS – which are fully operational and in use by dozens of customers around the world, the new Skylark C transforms and
Military
The US Air Force is about to take two more major steps as part of its “get well” program for the remotely piloted aircraft enterprise—a big pay boost for RPA pilots and new operating bases for the aircraft. Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James, in a Wednesday briefing at
Military
The Royal Navy is looking towards the Unmanned Warrior exercise that will take place later this year to assess “all options” for the replacement of its Boeing/Insitu ScanEagle unmanned air vehicles, which will go out of service in late 2017. Procured under a two-year urgent operational requirement (UOR) contract
Business
AeroVironment, Inc. announced the United States Navy has tested and deployed the RQ-20B Puma small unmanned aircraft system (UAS) aboard a Flight I Guided Missile Destroyer (DDG Class). Some of these exercises included the use of AeroVironment’s fully autonomous system to recover the aircraft aboard a ship. The US
Business
Spain has taken is first concrete step towards joining the pan-European military unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) programme with the cabinet approving an initial instalment to cover set-up costs. In doing so it will join France, Germany, and Italy in the development of a medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) UAV that is hoped