Royal Navy uncrewed aircraft trial marks European first
UK flight test sees largest unmanned aircraft take off from a Royal Navy aircraft carrier.
Northrop Grumman L-3 MAS have announced plans today to join forces on a variant of the Northrop Grumman-produced Global Hawk high-altitude, long-endurance (HALE) unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for Canada to maintain continuous surveillance of its Arctic territories.
The system, called the Polar Hawk, will be designed to stay aloft for long periods of time in harsh weather conditions over vast expanses of the Earth's surface monitoring land, ice, littoral and open water environments throughout the Arctic.
It will fly at 60,000 feet, well above challenging weather and all commercial air traffic, with a range of over 22,000 kilometres and stay airborne for more than 33 hours, day or night in all weather conditions, the companies said.
According to the two companies, in addition to its surveillance payloads, Polar Hawk has the power to support and can be equipped with a wide range of instrumentation for conducting science and environmental missions, as demonstrated by NASA using earlier versions of the Global Hawk UAS as far as 85 degrees north latitude. It can also be deployed to support humanitarian missions and provide surveillance over Canada's vast territory stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific territorial waters and coasts.
UK flight test sees largest unmanned aircraft take off from a Royal Navy aircraft carrier.
CATIC have displayed its new AR-2000 drone at Dubai Airshow 2023, emphasising ship-based capabilities with PLA already purchasing.
Australia has ordered four Northrop Grumman MQ-4C Triton UAS which can operate as an uncrewed maritime patrol aircraft (MPA) alongside the country’s in-service Boeing P-8A MPA fleet.
The Khronos tethered UAS has been designed to be simple to use and has drawn on Elistair’s experience with hundreds of existing customers.
The use of long-duration Uncrewed Surface Vehicles for maritime surveillance and monitoring has become part of the fleet inventory as navies try to reduce the level of effort required to gather intelligence on areas of interest.
A growing number of uncrewed systems have been on show at Sydney's Indo-Pacific Maritime exhibition with a select few currently being trialled to see if they can enhance the Royal Australian Navy's surveillance levels.