South Korea on Wednesday unveiled its latest unmanned aircraft, a tilt-rotor design, claiming it to be the world’s fastest.
The aircraft was developed by the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (KARI) affiliated with the Ministry of Knowledge Economy in cooperation with private defense companies, a KARI official said. The project started in 2002.
The 5-meter-long, 7-meter-wide aircraft has a top cruise speed of 500 kilometers per hour, according to the researcher. Its fly-by-wire flight control system was developed by the domestic developers while rotor and drive systems were built under an international partnership. About 20 domestic companies participated in the development. Among the major developers are LIG Nex1, Huneed Technologies and Youngpoong Electronics.
“Normally a UAV is operated by remote control dozens or hundreds of kilometers away, so a convergence IT technology of data transmission and others is very important,” Park Kyun-je, head of KARI’s smart UAV development team, said after the tilt-rotor’s demonstration flight at an aviation center in Goheung, South Jeolla Province.
“We’ve secured that key technology of our own and that’s so meaningful in this development project,” he said, adding the Korean tilt-rotor aircraft is remote-controlled by 200 kilometers away.
The UAV is to be used both for military and civil purposes, such as traffic controls and the prevention of forest fires as well as weather and environmental surveys, according to KARI officials.
Mass production is expected to begin in less than three years after more test trials on collision detection systems and flight speed are completed next March, they said. The institute is also working on to downsize the aircraft to about 60 percent of its original form to develop a smaller variant dubbed TR-6X.
“The smart UAV can also be used as the platform for a personal air vehicle that is capable of door-to-door operations without a runway,” an official at the ministry said.
The aircraft has “tilt rotors,” meaning its rotary wings tilt, giving it a helicopter-like capability to vertically take off and land when its wings are facing upward, and the speed and operation range of a jet when its wings are tilted forward, according to the Ministry of Knowledge Economy.
Nam Ki-man, a ministry official, claimed that the aircraft was also the world’s fastest unmanned aircraft, with a cruise speed of 400 kilometers per hour, or about “twice as fast as a helicopter.”
The price of the aircraft has yet to be set, mainly because the developers are not yet sure of their initial production volume. Nam said mass production could begin in less than three years after the development of the aircraft is completed in March.
Source: Yonhap News; The Korea Times