Leonardo is confident that by the autumn it will have created a UK team through which it can drive the development of air-launched effects (ALE) – collaborative drone swarms that could be deployed from a helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft.
Last year, the company’s UK arm detailed testing it had performed using an AW159 Wildcat and ground-launched drones supplied by Anduril Industries.
Leonardo sees the uncrewed air vehicle swarms – or what head of strategy and technology Simon Harwood calls “murmurations” – as being able to work collaboratively to perform a wide variety of missions, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR), search and rescue, or even attack.
In addition, Leonardo sees the potential for the ALE swarm to act as a deployed part of an aircraft’s defensive aids suite (DAS) creating a “ring of steel” around an aircraft, Harwood told FlightGlobal at the Royal International Air Tattoo at RAF Fairford in the UK on 19 July.
Although no defined requirement currently exists from the UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) for an ALE capability, Leonardo is pressing ahead to ensure it is ready when such a need emerges.
“There’s no demand from the MoD. But that’s partly because nobody has invented it yet so there’s not a need and no customer,” he says.
Leonardo’s task is to take “a lot of really promising technology and assemble it into a serious military capability”.
Harwood says the company has been “doing other tests behind the scenes”, notably of swarming capabilities and “deploying technology in realistic environments to test how it can work”.
However, despite the “significant” internal research and development spending, Harwood acknowledges the company is not an expert in all the necessary areas to bring a system to market.
As a result, it is looking to partner across the industry and form a UK-based team to advance the technology, he says.
Although the process of agreeing workshare is in its “early stages”, Harwood is confident it can be wrapped up by the autumn.
He declines to reveal the other team members, but says the grouping ranges from small and medium-sized enterprises to larger companies and even “big primes”.
Despite the low technology readiness level of certain parts of the overall system, he believes an ALE capability could be ready for fielding by no later than the end of the decade, provided there is customer demand.
“We are not going to move this to deployment until [customers] have bought in to what we are doing,” he says. “We are talking to the [UK Ministry of Defence] about how they might use this capability.”
Deployed from a standard PILS launch tube carried on a weapon pylon, a helicopter like the Wildcat could be linked to a murmuration of between six and 20 ALE vehicles, he says.
He notes that the goal is not for the helicopter to control the ALE assets, but to link into their data feed and benefit from the effects the collaborative swarm can provide.
