The UK armed forces are exploring options for the strategic co-ordination of national industrial and scientific capabilities in the unmanned air vehicle sector through a new tri-service roadmap, which includes proposals to create a "community of excellence" to extend beyond purely military applications.

An initial draft of the roadmap prepared by the Royal Air Force during the third quarter of 2004 was approved by the UK Joint Chief of the Defence Staff last October, and a declassified version is now being considered for release.

The draft roadmap has four overarching priorities, according to its author, Wg Cdr Andy Jeffrey. "We need to have informed, efficient and effective acquisition through our research, through understanding the force mix and through understanding UAVs and UCAVs [unmanned combat air vehicles]," he told the Bristol University UAV Systems conference in mid-April. The UK should also support its knowledge base through research programmes, establish a world-class UAV community and remove barriers to the effective integration of unmanned vehicles, he said. If accepted, the initiative will "ensure coherency of programmes, research and technology and experimentation", and assure value for money in investment terms, he said.

The current document treats 2009-10 as a milestone period to standardise UAV operations across the UK. There is now "a key window in which the UK needs to get its act together to get UAVs into the air", he said. Evolution of the roadmap is expected over the next six months, following the incorporation of lessons learned during the UK's ongoing Joint UAV Experimentation Programme (JUEP).

While the roadmap and the paral­lel "community of excellence" initiatives would seek to establish close working links with the ParcAberporth UAV test range, Jeffrey says: "Given classification and industry issues, everybody is not going to move to a single point in the UK and start building UAVs and flying them." But he believes the concepts are "a way of bounding all these individual centres of excellence into a community".

PETER LA FRANCHI/BRISTOL

Source: Flight International

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