Unmanned Aircraft

The SIDM (Systeme Interimaire de Drone de MALE / Medium Altitude Long Endurance) is an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle developed by Military Air Systems and Israel Aircraft Industry (IAI) for the French customer. The system is designed to fulfil ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, Reconnaissance) missions at strategic, operational and tactical levels.

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EADS and Vertivision are working on definition studies for a future Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) UAV programme to meet joint requirements for the French Army and Navy. The current studies cover the feasibility of the UAV system and a demonstration phase including automatic ship deck landing prior to programme launch. The contract was awarded by the French armamant procurement agency DGA in November 2006.

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Euro Hawk - On 1 February 2007 the German Ministry of Defence has awarded a contract to EuroHawk GmbH, a joint venture company formed by Military Air Systems and Northrop Grumman, for the Euro Hawk unmanned signals intelligence (SIGINT) surveillance and reconnaissance system.
The Euro Hawk systems will replace the aging SIGINT version of the Breguet Atlantic aircraft, which have been in service since 1972. It is based on the HALE UAV (High Altitude Long Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) Global Hawk developed by Northrop Grumman. Military Air Systems supplies the SIGINT system - which provides stand-off capability to detect electronic intelligence (ELINT) radar emitters and communications intelligence (COMINT) emitters - and the ground stations that will receive and analyse the data from Euro Hawk.
Delivery of the first demonstrator is scheduled for 2010. Planned delivery of the following four UAVs is scheduled between 2011 and 2014.

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Scorpio - The lightweight, robust and user-friendly Scorpio UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) offers maximum flexibility and efficiency for ambitious missions, whether in the city, in the mountains or at sea, by day or night. The multi-purpose VTOL (Vertical Take-off and Landing) system can undertake diverse tasks for civil and military applications: e.g. detection, reconnaissance, identification, tracking and target illumination as well as over-the-hill reconnaissance and deployment in urban zones.

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Tracker (DRAC) - The Tracker (known in France under the name DRAC) is a tactical drone with hand-launchability for missions at close range. The UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) system is designed to extend significantly the reconnaissance capabilities for civil and military authorities. The user-friendly and lightweight system, which can be prepared for operation in a matter of minutes, is impressive with its excellent flight characteristics and robustness even under extreme operational conditions. The system meets the highest performance requirements even under complex operational conditions.

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Agile UAV - This programme is aiming at the research and development of an unmanned air system-of-systems approach within a netcentric operations environment: the interaction between integrated advanced sensor technique, an autonomous unmanned aircraft as one element in the networked information and control structures and the interaction with sensor-operators as well as UAV-operators is to be modelled, analysed and evaluated by the generic system demonstrator -agile UAV in network centric environment-€. The Agile UAV-NCE programme is intended to be executed in subsequent phases and to run until 2013, covering both, demonstrations by simulation as well as by real flight tests. Main features will be risk-reduction processes, the evaluation of key technologies, and the generation of operational concepts for future UAV systems. Military Air Systems is responsible for the complete system design and will contribute to the programme with the technology demonstrator Barracuda.

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