The General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) MQ-20 Avenger unmanned air vehicle has been tapped to perform autonomous “red air” training missions against fighter aircraft.
The $98 million US government contract comes under the auspices of Project Red 5 and sees GA-ASI become the lead systems integrator for the programme, says the company.
“The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense project, run by the Test Resource Management Center (TRMC), will prototype advanced autonomous air-to-air capability to provide adversary or ‘red’ air training profiles,” it says.
The company will provide a pair of MQ-20s as well as mission autonomy software, sensors, datalinks, and other mission systems.
The objective is to create “robust, autonomous ‘red air’ surrogate platforms” that can act as adversaries against “Blue Force” fourth- and fifth-generation fighters.
“GA-ASI has continued to invest and deploy our open architecture autonomy ecosystem integrated with best-of-breed mission systems,” says Jeff Hettick, GA-ASI vice-president for Agile Mission Systems.
“We are thrilled to partner with TRMC to bring these capabilities that create operationally relevant Red Air surrogates and significantly improve Blue Force mission success in realistic air-to-air training scenarios.”
