unmanned aireal vehicles

Elbit Systems has received a first purchase order worth approximately $180 million to supply the first three out of a maximum seven Watchkeeper X tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) as part of a framework contract with the Romanian Ministry of National Defense with a maximum value of approximately $410 million (1.89 billion Lei). The purchase order will be performed over a period of two years.

Norway and Britain have announced they will supply Black Hornet micro drones to Ukraine to aid in its war with Russia. The Teledyne Flir Black Hornet drones can be used for reconnaissance and target identification. The cost will be up to $9.26 million.

In a new concept video Lockheed Martin shows what it called Distributed Teams, consisting of a  manned fighter and unmanned dones. The technology is being developed by its famous innovation department, calles Skunk Works, and could be operational witin three years.

NASA and Boeing safely landed the company’s CST-100 Starliner spacecraft Wednesday in the desert of the western United States, completing the uncrewed Orbital Flight Test-2 (OFT-2) to the International Space Station to help prove the system is ready to fly astronauts.

The Ukraine armed forces claim they have used the Turkish Bayraktar TB2 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) to destroy Russian armored vehicles. In a video posted on scial media a strike on a military convoy is shown, apparantly by a drone. This would be the first time drones are used to kill in a major conflict, although the Bayraktar has been employed in other engagements as well.

Unmanned Valley and KPN have jointly created an environment for developing new drone applications in the Netherlands. The collaboration between the field lab for sensor-based technologies – located just north of The Hague in the Netherlands – and the leading provider of telecommunications and IT services in the Netherlands, allows companies to easily test innovations and demonstrate applications that use the commercially available KPN networks.

In recent tests at Eglin Air Force Base, DARPA’s Mobile Force Protection (MFP) program demonstrated a Counter-Unmanned Air System (C-UAS) multilayer defense architecture to defeat unauthorized drone intrusions over military installations or operations.

US Air Force announced it conducted a 2 hour and 10 minute flight test of the Skyborg autonomy core system, or ACS, aboard a Kratos UTAP-22 tactical unmanned vehicle at Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida. Follow-on events will demonstrate direct manned and unmanned teaming between aircraft and multiple ACS-controlled unmanned aircraft.

Attempts at airborne retrieval of three unmanned air vehicles, nicknamed Gremlins, were just inches from success in DARPA’s latest flight test series that started on October 28. Each X-61A Gremlins Air Vehicle (GAV) flew for more than two hours, successfully validating all autonomous formation flying positions and safety features.