Sikorskyβs unique rotor-blown drone completes first flight test
Sikorsky, the Lockheed Martin subsidiary best known for the Black Hawk helicopter, announced Wednesday at the Farnborough International Airshow that its Nomad 100 uncrewed aircraft has completed initial ground and flight testing under DARPAβs Early VTOL Aircraft Demonstration program, known as EVADE, a fast-track Pentagon research effort designed to push new vertical takeoff aircraft from [β¦]
NODA AI announced Wednesday it has secured a $10 million contract from the Department of War, the current name for the Department of Defense, to develop software that lets American military drones and autonomous vehicles keep executing a commanderβs orders even after enemy jamming or cyberattacks cut off their communications links. The contract funds an [β¦]
Ukraine has turned its signature long-range kamikaze drone into something considerably more dangerous: a standoff strike platform. The outlet Oboronka reported that its correspondent, present at the Farnborough International Airshow in the United Kingdom, saw an An-196 Liutyi drone displayed on a Ukrainian stand carrying four missiles mounted beneath its airframe, a configuration that would [β¦]
Russia will likely come out of its war against Ukraine as a more dangerous military power than it was before the invasion began, despite losing equipment and troops at a scale no major military has suffered in a conventional war since World War II, according to an analysis by Jakub Janovsky published on Fronts.co. That [β¦]
Anduril just unveiled a helicopter-killerβs replacement: a pilotless attack aircraft built specifically because attack helicopters have become too dangerous to fly. The defense technology company announced Thunder, an autonomous attack rotorcraft designed to fly alongside crewed helicopters like the Apache, absorbing the risk that increasingly cheap drones, loitering munitions, and persistent surveillance systems have turned [β¦]
Russian engineers have turned one of their most common military helicopters into a flying jammer built specifically to blind Ukraineβs long-range strike drones, Militarnyi reported, after a Russian propaganda Telegram channel accidentally revealed the previously unknown system in its own footage. The outlet identified the aircraft as a Mi-8, a twin-engine transport helicopter the Soviet [β¦]
The U.S. State Department approved a possible sale to Greece of Switchblade 300 Block 20 systems, a portable loitering munition built by AeroVironment (AV) that a single soldier can carry, launch from a tube in under two minutes, and fly toward a target before the drone itself explodes, destroying both the target and the aircraft [β¦]
A U.S. Navy security boat escorted an unfamiliar uncrewed vessel out of Naval Amphibious Base Little Creek, and the open-source account Aviation and Naval Assets shared photos and video of a boat that does not match any publicly known U.S. Navy drone design currently in service. The account, which tracks military aviation and naval hardware [β¦]
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) introduced HYPNOSIS, a navigation warfare system built to counter large numbers of drones and other satellite-guided aerial threats by scrambling the navigation signals those weapons depend on to find their targets, rather than physically shooting them down. Most modern drones, including the cheap, mass-produced one-way attack drones that have become a [β¦]
Somewhere in a Russian drone factory, an engineer looked at a satellite-jamming crisis that has cost the Kremlin countless drones and countless rubles, and solved it with the same tool Boy Scouts use to find their way out of the woods. A Ukrainian radio technology specialist says Russia has started bolting a basic magnetic compass [β¦]
Ukrainian drones reportedly struck Russiaβs Engels air base, officially known as Engels-2, in the Saratov region overnight into July 16, according to Russian Telegram channels and independent monitoring groups, with residents of both Engels and the neighboring city of Saratov reporting a barrage of low-flying drones followed by a string of powerful explosions. Engels-2 sits [β¦]
The U.S. Army has agreed to help test a weapon that fires interceptors using magnets instead of gunpowder or rocket fuel, betting that ditching traditional propulsion might finally solve a math problem that has been quietly draining Americaβs missile stockpiles. Auriga Space, a California company building electromagnetic launch technology, and the Armyβs Combat Capabilities Development [β¦]
Britainβs military just handed itself a $536 million-a-year budget and a five-point checklist for turning laboratory ideas into battlefield equipment faster than its notoriously slow defense bureaucracy has managed in decades. UK Defence Innovation, the Ministry of Defenceβs newly consolidated innovation arm known as UKDI, announced Wednesday the five core themes that will guide how [β¦]
Ukraine now builds roughly 10 million drones a year, a tenfold jump from the target President Volodymyr Zelenskyy first announced just three years ago, Radio Svoboda, the Ukrainian service of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, reported. Zelenskyy delivered the figure during a ceremony in Kyiv marking Ukrainian Statehood Day, framing it as proof that a goal [β¦]
Ukraineβs Unmanned Systems Forces, the branch of the Ukrainian military built specifically around drone warfare, said operators from the Rarog unit struck a Russian Mi-28 attack helicopter with a FPV (first-person-view) drone, a small remote-controlled aircraft flown by an operator wearing video goggles that show a live feed from a camera mounted on the drone [β¦]
A drone manufacturer founded by two former teenage drone-racing prodigies has landed a Pentagon contract worth up to $500 million to supply first-person-view attack drones to the U.S. Army, the Wall Street Journal reported. Neros Technologies, based in El Segundo, California, will mass-produce the low-cost, expendable drones that have come to define modern battlefield tactics [β¦]
Sudanβs army destroyed two Chinese-made combat drones flown by the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces within the same operation, one shot out of the sky with an air-to-air missile and a second wrecked on the ground, according to footage published July 13 by Clash Report, a Turkish-based news outlet that has covered Sudanβs drone war extensively. [β¦]
Ukraineβs military appears to have carried out its first mass simultaneous strike using converted light aircraft that function as reusable, remotely piloted bombers, with Serhii Sternenko, an adviser to Ukraineβs Defense Minister, publishing photos showing at least ten of the modified planes armed with Soviet-designed high-explosive bombs and describing the image as one worth calling [β¦]
Ukrainian ground robots ran more than 16,600 supply and evacuation missions in June, the highest monthly total since the Defense Ministry began tracking the numbers in January, and the pace shows no sign of slowing as Kyiv pushes to get soldiers off the most exposed roads to the front. Defense Minister Mykhailo Fedorov said the [β¦]
OpenWorks Engineering, a counter-drone specialist based in Northumberland, England, announced this week that it recently attended an industry-focused counter-unmanned aircraft systems, or C-UAS, event at the British Armyβs Larkhill Garrison, where the company demonstrated its Vision Pace targeting system to defense and security partners. Larkhill sits on Salisbury Plain in Wiltshire and has served as [β¦]