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June 14, 2023 | International, Aerospace

Kuwait to buy Turkish-made TB2 drones in $367 million deal

The Bayraktar TB2 can carry lightweight, laser-guided bombs and fly for up to 27 hours at a time.

https://www.c4isrnet.com/unmanned/2023/06/14/kuwait-to-buy-turkish-made-tb2-drones-in-367-million-deal/

On the same subject

  • Military Technology Could Bolster Bell’s Commercial Helicopters

    November 3, 2020 | International, Aerospace

    Military Technology Could Bolster Bell’s Commercial Helicopters

    Tony Osborne October 30, 2020 Bell is pondering how to incorporate advanced technologies developed for its future military platforms into its commercial rotorcraft. Since its rebranding as more of a technology company than a helicopter OEM, CEO Mitch Snyder has been pushing the company on a course of innovation, investing in autonomous flight and electric propulsion as well as advancing defense capabilities. But there appears to be little obvious gain for Bell's line of civil rotorcraft. In the last couple of years, its commercial helicopters have received only fairly minor upgrades. The Model 407GXi light single-engine platform had its avionics upgraded so that it can fly under instrument flight rules, while the Model 412 medium twin received new avionics and uprated power. Yet both upgrades were essentially spun off from modifications for military programs. The 407 update was developed for the U.S. Navy's rotary-wing trainer requirement, which Bell lost to Leonardo, and the 412EPi was born from the type's selection by Japan for its UH-X military utility requirement. Bell's restraint in further developing commercial rotorcraft likely is due to its prolonged effort to bring the new Model 525 to market. Nor is it a great time to bring a new aircraft to market. Sales remain stubbornly slow in the aftermath of a fall in energy prices that dramatically reduced orders from the lucrative oil-and-gas support market. Progress in bringing the fly-by-wire, 9.3-metric-ton 525 super-medium to market—it was launched in 2012 and flown for the first time in 2015—has been painfully slow, in part due to the fatal loss of one prototype but also due to the need to convince certification authorities of fly-by-wire technology benefits. “The hurdle is higher now to try and get [the 525] certified,” Snyder told Aviation Week during a virtual roundtable on Oct. 19. “This technology brings all these benefits and makes the aircraft safer. . . . You have to walk them through and give them time to understand it,” he said. Snyder believes things are on track. “We feel very good about getting certified in 2021,” he added, noting that the company is finishing up testing and preparing for the submission of certification documentation to the FAA. He said Bell is continuing to evaluate new commercial platforms, although the cost of development and certification is prohibitive. “We're always looking to see if there's a clean-sheet out there that we may want to do,” he said. “But I can tell you, at least right now, our focus has been around derivatives to our military products and more about adapting upgrades to our existing models.” The approach appears to be in line with his views at last year's Paris Air Show, where he suggested Bell may not develop a new clean-sheet commercial conventional rotorcraft beyond the 525. One area of opportunity could be development of a single-engine medium helicopter, he hinted, building on Bell's Model 360 Invictus prototype for the U.S. Army's Future Attack Reconnaissance Aircraft (FARA) requirement. “Bell's got a lot of single-mediums out there,” said Snyder, noting that hundreds of Model 204/205 Iroquois helicopters remain in service with militaries, civilian operators and government agencies. Operators have become reliant on twin-engine helicopters, particularly because in some parts of the world, notably Europe, single-engine rotorcraft are banned from flying over urban areas. But Snyder said the 360 Invictus also features a supplemental power unit that can act as an auxiliary power unit as well as provide additional performance or auto-rotation power, and could be an enabler for a single-engine medium. It is possible that Bell is looking at a military utility variant of the 360 Invictus, pairing the aircraft with the attack version in the same way that its UH-1Y Venom and AH-1Z Viper platforms have built on the Huey and Cobra. Such a platform could receive interest from the U.S. special operations community, which is looking to replace the Boeing AH-6/MH-6 Little Bird family. Officials have noted that they would like to be able to adapt a FARA platform to carry troops. Sikorsky's Raider X can do so, but the Bell FARA cannot, until a more utilitarian version emerges (AW&ST June 1-14, p. 28). The Army's selection of Bell's V-280 tiltrotor as the larger Future Long-Range Assault Aircraft could enable a commercial spinoff of the platform, Snyder suggests. Bell is also looking to make commercial use of its Electrically Distributed Anti-Torque (EDAT) technology, a ducted electric tailrotor system tested on a Bell 429 light-twin. Flight tests for it were only revealed in February, despite the aircraft's flights in plain sight from its Mirabel, Quebec, facility since May 2019. Testing showed that the EDAT reduced noise levels, but there were also benefits in terms of safety, enabling the option of switching off the anti-torque system while the engines and main rotor are still turning. The EDAT eliminates complex tailrotor gearboxes and shafts and requires less costly inspections and maintenance as well. “We pulled in off-the-shelf technologies to make the demo occur within one year,” said Snyder. “Now we're evaluating what the real technology needs to be as far as repackaging it in the weight and size that we require.” Snyder said the EDAT technology will be aimed at a commercial rotorcraft, but for which product line or when it might be commercially available has yet to be decided. https://aviationweek.com/aerospace/aircraft-propulsion/military-technology-could-bolster-bells-commercial-helicopters

  • Some Ukraine drone pilots fear early advantage over Russia now lost | Reuters

    November 9, 2023 | International, Land

    Some Ukraine drone pilots fear early advantage over Russia now lost | Reuters

    The soldiers piloting Ukraine's fleet of small, cheap assault drones are voicing concerns that, despite pioneering their use, they are now being leapfrogged by their adversary as Moscow pumps money and resources into its drone sector.

  • Israel’s Rafael integrates artificial intelligence into Spice bombs

    June 18, 2019 | International, Aerospace

    Israel’s Rafael integrates artificial intelligence into Spice bombs

    By: Seth J. Frantzman and Kelsey D. Atherton Rafael Advanced Defense System's Spice bombs now have a new technological breakthrough as the Israeli company enables its Spice 250 with artificial intelligence alongside automatic target recognition to be used with scene-matching technology. The Spice 250, which can be deployed on quad racks under the wings of warplanes like the F-16, has a 75-kilogram warhead and a maximum range of 100 kilometers with its deployable wings. Its electro-optic scene-matching technology — which involves uploading terrain data onto the bomb and combining it with real-time electro-optic imagery — allows the weapon to work in GPS-denied environments. And the bomb can use this autonomous capability to navigate and correct its location, according to Gideon Weiss, Rafael's deputy general manager of marketing and business development at the company's air and C4I division. With its AI and “deep learning” technologies, the weapon has the ability to identity moving ground targets and distinguish them from other objects and terrain. This is based on 3D models uploaded to the bomb as well as algorithms. As the weapon identifies and homes in on its target, such as a convoy of vehicles, it separates the convoy of interest from other vehicles it has “learned” to ignore. “The deep-learning algorithm is indifferent to the actual data fed to it for modeling targets of interest and embedding their pertaining characteristics into the system," Weiss said. "However, the more the data used for modeling is representative of the target of interest, the more robust the recognition probability will be in real life.” Rafael has completed the development and testing phase of the Spice 250, including flight tests, which have “proven the robustness of the ATA and ATR, so it is mature for delivery,” Weiss said, using acronyms for automatic target acquisition and recognition. Asked if the ATR algorithm will select a secondary target if the computer cannot find the initial human-selected target, Weiss said: “This goes into the area of user-defined policies and rules of engagement, and it is up to the users to decide on how to apply the weapon, when and where to use it, and how to define target recognition probabilities and its eventuality.” Automatically selecting a secondary target may eventually become part of the upgrade profile for the munition, if customers express significant interest in the feature. With a two-way data link and a video-streaming capability, the bomb can be aborted or told to re-target up until a “few second before the weapon hits its target,” Weiss explained. That two-way data-link, enabled by the weapon's mounting on a Smart Quad Rack, or SQR, will enable future deep learning to be based on data extracted from earlier launches. Data recorded will include either live-streaming video or a burst of still images of the entire homing phase up until impact. “These are automatically and simultaneously recorded on the SQR — enabling two functions: (a) real-time and post-mission BDI (Bomb Damage Indication); (b) post-mission target data extraction for intel updates, etc.," Weiss said. "The ATR capability, including its deep learning updates, must be more agile than the enemy's ability to conceal and/or change its battlefield footprint, tactics, appearance or anything else which might impede the ATR from accurately recognizing and destroying targets.” The Spice family of weapons is operational with the Israeli Air Force and international customers. https://www.defensenews.com/artificial-intelligence/2019/06/17/israels-rafael-integrates-artificial-intelligence-into-spice-bombs/

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