Countries Big and Small Set Out to Make Their Own Pilotless Aircraft

By Stew Magnuson

A stroll down the aisles of the IDEX defense exhibition here confirmed that the unmanned aerial vehicle market is growing. Turkey, Switzerland, Pakistan, South Africa, Jordan, Italy and Austria were just a handful of the countries that were selling the technology and actively trying to market it to foreign or domestic customers.In a booth outside the main hall, students from Abu Dhabi University displayed a UAV they built as a classroom project.Analysts say the U.S. military’s success using the technology in recent years is driving more countries to either obtain or build their own aerial drones. U.S. and Israeli manufacturers still have the most advanced systems, but there is plenty of emerging competition out there.“Almost everybody and his brother is making UAVs. Whether or not they’re going to sell them to anybody is the question,” said unmanned vehicles analyst Larry Dickerson of Forecast International.The U.S. military’s interest in the technology dates back to at least the 1970s, but hobbyists have been operating radio controlled airplanes long before that. Now, it’s just a matter of attaching a small, lightweight digital video camera to one of these easily obtained toys. Of course, police and militaries want better systems than those invented in hobbyists’ garages.Burt van Staade, business development manager for UAV systems at South Africa’s Denel Dynamics, provided a case study of how the technology is proliferating and steadily improving.The South African military bought an unmanned system from a foreign manufacturer about 25 years ago, he said. He declined to name the country, although analysts told National Defense it came from Israel.The purpose of the purchase was to see how it worked, so the military could embark on its own program. The result was the Seeker UAV Surveillance system. Next came the Seeker II, a digital system with a 250 kilometer range, 10 hours of endurance, plus day and night reconnaissance ability from altitudes of up to 18,000 feet.Denel Dynamics then began marketing the Seeker II to overseas customers. It has sold seven systems to four different nations, although not to the South African military, Van Staade said.Each system has four aircraft, but some have crashed due to operator errors, so Denel has sold some replacement UAVs as well. He declined to reveal the customers or the price tag for the system.Despite the failure to sell the Seeker II to the South African military, the company has continued with development of a third-generation aircraft, the Seeker 400, Van Staade said. It will be able to carry two payloads instead of one, fly for 16 hours and will have a 10-meter wing span — three meters longer than its predecessor.“We are right on top compared to other manufacturers as far as the reliability of the system … On the Seeker 400, we can only do better,” he said. Testing continues this year on the new version.There will be more potential customers for UAV manufacturers such as Denel during the coming decade, according to market analysts.The Teal Group in a February report predicted that the worldwide market for unmanned aircraft will total more than $62 billion during the next 10 years.The U.S military is driving the demand and serving as a catalyst. Despite the myriad international companies vying for this business, the United States will invest 72 percent of the worldwide spending on research, development, training and evaluation for the systems. It will also account for 61 percent of the procurement, the report said.The group’s World Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems, Market Profile and Forecast 2009, said the demand for battlefield intelligence is key to this growth. The emergence of hunt-and-kill drones –- ones that are armed with missiles — may also fuel sales.Philip Finnegan, who authored the manufacturers’ overview of the Teal Group study, said small, tactical UAVs are seen as a relatively easy way for small companies to enter the aviation market.“A lot of countries see the future of aerospace as being UAVs, so the aspiration is to make their own,” he said.These new competitors in the small UAV market have role models in the U.S. industry. AeroVironment, maker of the 4.2–pound Raven, and Insitu Inc., which produces the ScanEagle, are two examples. Now, defense industry giants are buying up these smaller companies. Boeing purchased Insitu and Textron Systems bought AAI Corp., manufacturer of the Army’s Shadow. Rockwell Collins snapped up UAV guidance control and navigation system developer Athena Technologies.------- At the IDEX show, Asad Kamal, head of marketing for Pakistan’s Integrated Defense Systems (IDS), said his nation would like to crack this market as well. He showed two scale models of small UAVs vying to be selected by the Pakistan military as the nation’s primary surveillance and reconnaissance drones.The IDS HUMA-1 model weighs 270 pounds, has a 44-pound payload capacity and a range of 160 miles. It is launched with a rocket booster and lands using a parachute. It features GPS based auto piloting with a automatic “return home” mode in case the satellite link is lost.Pakistani rival Xpert Engineering offers the UQAB-PI tactical UAV that weighs 286 pounds, travels 160 miles and carries a 22-pound payload. It makes runway landings and also has GPS navigation.The Pakistan military will evaluate the two systems this year and select one. Afterwards, the winner will attempt to enter the international market, Kamal said.Pakistani manufacturers will have to compete with European UAV makers such as Switzerland’s Innosuisse Corp., which is marketing the NT 150 tactical UAV made from the same composite material Formula One racecar manufacturers use. The only difference is that the aircraft’s composite airframe is five times stronger, said Hans-Christian Stuber, chairman of Innosuisse Corp.“Even if it crashes, nothing will break,” he said. The lightweight material gives it six to eight hours of endurance while carrying an 88-pound payload. In addition, it features an optional “virtual cockpit” — a helmet mounted view screen in which the pilot can see what the UAV sees.“There is tremendous interest in this because it makes life much easier for the people who have to control the aircraft,” he said.Finnegan said there is hope for these small players because it’s a new technology that is produced in relatively small quantities. “It is a field where smaller manufacturers have a shot.” They can be flexible, innovative and they have lower overhead, he added. -------South Korea, Singapore and China — countries that have strong track records of exporting technology — will be the nations with an edge when it comes to this growing market, he said.A dark horse is Japan. The nation is a robotics powerhouse, but is not an arms exporter due to a pacifist ideology that dates back to the post-World War II years. Japanese-made UAVs have mostly been designed for agricultural use.There is now serious discussion in the country about dropping some of these restrictions. If that were to happen, Japan could emerge as a force in the military UAV market, Finnegan said.While unmanned aerial systems still don’t rival manned aircraft in terms of profits, the big defense contractors recognize that no matter which direction the U.S. military budget goes, there will be an increasing demand for UAVs, Finnegan said.Forecast International predicted the worldwide market for reconnaissance and surveillance UAVs through 2017 will total $17 billion. The United States, Europe and Israel will account for about 80 percent of the market share, Dickerson said.As for the smaller upstarts, about 90 percent of their programs will end up in the hands of domestic customers. Just because it’s relatively easy to build the aircraft, doesn’t mean they can compete with well established manufacturers, Dickerson said.“I can make one in my backyard if I wanted to. I found a small enough camera to fit on one of my son’s remote controlled airplanes. And I can hook it up with a Wi-Fi network and fly it around my neighborhood,” Dickerson said.Such small, rudimentary UAVs may be easy to build, but military or police may want something more sophisticated. Do they need anti-jamming capability? Secure communications? How high of a resolution is needed for the cameras?“The air vehicle is not the hard part. The electronics and integrating them is the hard part.” It’s the sophisticated electronics where they have a hard time competing, Dickerson said.Finnegan said the benefit of flying a UAV is the cameras and sensors on board that give commanders battlefield situational awareness. Payloads small enough to fit on tactical UAVs are extremely hard to develop. The newcomers to the field will still have to purchase these subsystems from sophisticated manufacturers. The Teal Group forecasts a $5 billion per year market in UAV payloads by 2018. It’s currently about $2 billion per year.Dickerson said Singapore is one country that may have the technological ability and the money to build complex aerial drones. The United Arab Emirates has also been pursuing its own systems.The wealthy nation has the funds to build the aircraft, he noted, but it has limited domestic applications for them. Wealthy investors there could throw money at the project and build high-tech aircraft, but will they be able to find overseas customers to support the industry?Manufacturers such as Denel Dynamics, the maker of the South African Seeker series, needed Israeli technology to get off the ground, Dickerson noted. But the Seeker II now has a “pretty good” level of sophistication, he added.“The South Africans have the technological capability to build UAVs, they just don’t have a lot of money. That’s why they are looking for international customers and partners,” Dickerson said. “It makes it tough because they are competing with some really big companies with lots and lots of money.”The market will also depend on the size of the UAV.The upstarts may fare better with small UAVs similar in size to the Army’s Ravens rather than medium-altitude, long-endurance aircraft such as the U.S. Air Force’s Predator.The Sri Lankans built a rudimentary drone based on model airplanes to peer down at the Tamil Tigers. That might be good enough for their purposes, Dickerson said. Irregular forces such as the Tigers or the Taliban in Pakistan probably don’t have electronic warfare capability to jam signals.In addition, medium and large UAVs are normally controlled by satellite links. That’s going to be beyond the means of these smaller programs, Dickerson said.

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