A fleet of almost 20 Herti aircraft have been produced for surveillance applications
BAE GROWS
INTO UAVS
UK company transforms itself into a niche player in the
unmanned systems market with the help of acquisitions
BY CRAIG HOYLE
Best known for its Hawk jet trainer
and Nimrod MRA4 surveillance aircraft,
and for partnerships on the
Eurofighter Typhoon and Lockheed
Martin F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, BAE Systems
is also carving out a growing niche as a developer
of unmanned systems.
While the bulk of this work is conducted by
600 staff at its Warton manufacturing site in
Lancashire, the UK company also has expertise
in two of its other self-styled “home markets”
– Australia and the USA.
BAE Systems Australia can trace its work
on unmanned air vehicle technologies back
through products such as the
Kingfisher
and the
flightglobal.com/auvsi
Brumby, with the former having been used to
support trials for almost a decade. These have
included testing a BAE-developed ground
control station (GCS), and its imagery collection
and exploitation (ICE) payload, which
uses autonomy to reduce operator workload.
But BAE’s entry into the North American
UAV sector is more nascent, stemming from
its recent acquisition of Tucson, Arizonabased
Advanced Ceramics Research (ACR).
Previously privately owned, the company employs
around 60 people and has a UAV range
including the Coyote, Manta and Silver Fox,
plus GCS equipment and portable launchers.
Completed in June, ACR’s acquisition as
part of BAE Systems Inc. is in line with chief
executive Ian King’s strategy to grow BAE in
home markets Australia, Saudi Arabia, South
Africa, Sweden, the UK and the USA, and to
build in others, such as India and Japan.
BAE Systems
DEVELOPMENT
The purchase also expands its unmanned
product range from UK-developed systems
including the Herti UAV and the Mantis and
Taranis demonstrators.
BAE surprised many people in late 2005,
when it lifted the lid on its development and
trials activities with autonomous UAVs. Far
from unveiling futuristic mock-ups, it detailed
a more than three-year program through
which it had already secretly flown airframes
named the Kestrel, Raven, Corax and Herti.
The latter three designs were taken to Australia’s
Woomera test range for their flight
campaigns, with BAE having already made
one risk-reduction flight with its subscale Kestrel
in the UK. The unmanned combat air vehicle-like
Raven made its autonomous debut
in December 2003, followed little over a year
later by the surveillance-roled Corax.
While these systems were intended to demonstrate
technologies such as autonomous
control and operation, BAE from an early
stage viewed the Herti – first flown in 2004 –
as a viable product.
Derived from a manned glider produced by
Polish firm J&AS Aero Design, the Herti has
supported military trials for the UK Royal Air
Force from Camp Bastion in Afghanistan, and
more recently with the Royal Australian Air
Force. BAE now has a stock of almost 20 of
the aircraft, including fatigue test examples.
The first production-standard Herti was unveiled
last year, as the first of three built by
Slingsby Aviation. The new aircraft has a
maximum take-off weight of 1,650lb (750kg),
versus the previous design’s 1,150lb limit, and
carries a Cobalt electro-optical/infrared sensor
from Sweden’s FLIR Systems Polytech.
“We kept the other two behind the curtain
as ready for conversion,” says Andy Wilson,
BAE’s sales and marketing director for military
autonomous systems (air), who adds that
future production orders for the type “will
probably go through the Slingsby route.”
BAE had hoped to receive an urgent operational
requirement (UOR) contract to again
operate the Herti over Afghanistan, but this
has failed to materialise. “At the moment, all
we are doing is working with the RAF in case
they want it,” says Wilson. An entire system, ���
Jointly funded with the UK MoD, BAE’s Mantis could provide a domestic alternative to General Atomics’ armed Reaper UAV
August 13 2009 | Flight Daily News | 17
Craig Hoyle/Flight International
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