Joint-venture Firestar Systems is seeing strong interest from developing markets for its range of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) for both intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), and strike missions.
Firestar is a collaboration between Mexico’s Hydra Technologies and Turkey’s Transvaro, Hydra has decades of experience with UAVs, particularly in support of domestic security missions, while Transvaro has extensive manufacturing capabilities.
Over the last two years, the company has seen interest from customers in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East.
The ASU-45 UAV can operate from austere airstrips and carry a pair of air-to-ground munitions from the company’s Silent Dagger guided weapons range.
The company is also promoting its Hellhawk-LM loitering munition, which has an endurance of 4h and carries a 20kg warhead. The fire-and-forget version of Hellhawk features a range of 270nm (400km) and is capable of precision strikes.
A swarm of Hellhawks can saturate targets and also serve as decoys to distract enemies from ISR systems such as the ASU-45 platform, the company says.
The company’s cannister-launched Skysting-F loitering munition can be carried by personnel. The system features an endurance of 10min and a range of 5.4nm. Skysting-F also has an air-launch capability.
