MICRO AIR VEHICLES
A drone of your own
Unmanned aerial vehicles are changing the nature of 21st century warfare. Tim Ripley looks at a new
generation of much smaller craft that can be carried to the front line in backpacks and launched by hand
WHEN a Royal Marine was shot in
Afghanistan in January last year during
a vicious battle in an old desert fort, his
colleagues could not find him in the
confusion. As they pulled back to
regroup, concern grew that Taliban
insurgents had captured him.
24
Within minutes, the marines had
launched a Lockheed Martin Desert
Hawk mini-unmanned aerial vehicle
(UAV) to find out what was happening
behind enemy lines. Pictures downloaded
in real time from the Desert Hawk into a
briefcase-sized control unit showed the
body in the centre of the fort.
Unsure whether their colleague was
dead or wounded, the marines organised
a daring rescue mission in which four
men strapped themselves on to the
outside of two Apache attack helicopters.
Unfortunately, by the time they reached
their stricken friend, he was dead, but the
rescuers were able to retrieve his body.
The incident illustrates the potential
advantages of mini-UAVs — or micro air
vehicles (MAVs) — that can be carried in
a soldier’s backpack and used to deliver
images to frontline troops.
As well as their operational appeal,
MAVs cost a fraction of their larger
cousins such as the Predator, Reaper and
Global Hawk — tens of thousands rather
than millions of pounds for a single
system. General Atomics’ airliner-sized
Reaper UAV can cost more than
£5m, excluding the tens of millions
of pounds for the supporting
communications infrastructure.
The diminutive class of UAV began to
earn recognition during the past seven
years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The first front-line users were highly
secret special forces operatives who used
their ‘black’ or covert equipment budgets
to sidestep conservative procurement
bureaucracies and buy large numbers of
MAVs for use in the war on terror.
The main reason behind these
purchases was the need to over-fly remote
Afghan mountain ridges to try to spot
small groups of Taliban lying in wait to
ambush coalition forces. Britain’s elite
Special Air Service is known to have
Lockheed Martin’s
Desert Hawk is
now an
established
reconnaissance
tool
FutuRe
of defence & security
tested the Buster mini-UAV, and the
regiment’s US counterpart was the first
big customer for these revolutionary
systems. Now most US and British
bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have
their own flight of mini-UAVs to patrol
the perimeter around the clock, looking
for hostile forces.
The defining feature of MAVs is that
‘Many of the world’s armed forces have
visions of swarms of air and land robots
dominating the battlefields of the future’
they can be carried and deployed by a
single soldier. This means the air
vehicle, radio downlink and control
unit can all be packed into a single
rucksack, then taken into a combat
zone.
Beyond this, the market is filled
with a diverse array of products.
Many are little more than glorified
the EnGIneeR 29 SEPTEMBER–12 OCTOBER 2008
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