flightglobal.comUNMANNED SYSTEMS
Special report
34 | Flight International | 3-9 March 2020
GARRETT REIM LOS ANGELES
A future air force built around inexpensive unmanned
systems will require defence industry to devise new business
model that is no longer reliant on maintenance work
Disposable
incoming
T
he Pentagon’s interest in attritable
unmanned air vehicles (UAVs), via
experiments such as the Dynetics
X-61A Gremlins and Kratos
Defense & Security Solutions XQ-58A
Valkyrie, has aerospace manufacturers re-
thinking their lucrative MRO and upgrade
business lines.
Because attritable aircraft are designed to
have limited service life and be cheap
enough to be lost in combat or discarded
when obsolete, the traditional model of cap-
turing long-term government business via
vendor lock – selling proprietary aircraft to
the US Department of Defense (DoD) and
then making profits on MRO and upgrades
- could be disrupted.
While attritable aircraft will not totally re-
place piloted platforms in the short term –
or perhaps ever – some manufacturers are
preparing for the impact of the new UAVs.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems,
which manufactures the MQ-9 Reaper UAV
for the US Air Force (USAF), believes it
needs to shift its business model towards re-
searching, developing and fielding new
Modular aircraft such as the X-61A
may see support reduced to quick-
change upgrades or parts salvagetechnologies, despite the fact that it currently
makes a significant amount of revenue from ser-
vicing fleets of its legacy UAVs.
“If you’re focused on MRO and depots that
would be a losing proposition,” says Chris
Pehrson, vice-president of strategic develop-
ment for DoD customers at General Atomics.
“But if you’re the one focused on cutting-edge
capabilities and doing that rapid refresh then
you could win.”DEVELOPMENT EFFORT
For example, General Atomics is spending
internal research and development funds to de-
velop a new attritable jet-powered UAV called
SparrowHawk, that could be air launched from
and air recoverable by the MQ-9, the company
told FlightGlobal in November 2019. The air-
craft is not intended for any specific USAF pro-
gramme of record.
Central to staying ahead of the competition in
a possible era of attritable aircraft is the need to
develop, build and own a few key business lines- for example, vehicle design, airframe final as-
sembly and integration of software and hard-
ware, say aerospace manufacturers. The rest of
the work can be contracted to whichever third-
party vendor has the best technology for the job.
Aerospace firms say it is important to
make attritable aircraft that are modular and
have open-systems architecture to enable
this strategy. Such designs make it easy for
third parties to plug and play their top-of-
the-line hardware or software, enhancing the
value of an airframe beyond what a prime
manufacturer could do on its own.
Modularity also makes it easy to replace
broken parts.
That is the thinking behind the US Air
Force Research Laboratory’s XQ-58A
Valkyrie, which has a modular nose cone and
front midsection, as well as plug-and-play
interfaces to allow sensor hardware to be
quickly swapped in and out.
“We want to build the airframe, integrate
the engine, but be very open to incorporating
best-in-class technology and mission systems
from whoever,” says Steve Fendley, president
of Kratos’s unmanned systems division. “Let’s
maximise the utility of the system and not try
to force a cookie-cutter solution down the
customer’s throat.”
The USAF’s move towards attritable air-
craft is compounded by its interest in adopt-
ing aerospace rapid prototyping technologies,
as well as hardware and software innovation
from the world of Silicon Valley.
“I would like to get back to where we do
things more experimentally, more prototype
based,” said Will Roper, assistant secretary of
the USAF for acquisition, technology and lo-
gistics at the 2019 Paris air show. “Go into
production at some level, but always with the
forethought that production is not going to
Retirement could be best cost-saving strategy for high-maintenance types such as B-1B last because we are going to leapfrog it.”
US Air Force