SELEX Galileo, a Finmeccanica company, has announced a further export customer for its Falco Tactical Unmanned Aircraft System.This new sale brings the total number of nations who have purchased the Falco to four, while the worldwide operating fleet exceeds fifty aircraft.
In another UAS development, SELEX Galileo has released photos of the company’s new Falco EVO undergoing a runway rollout – the final step before the official “maiden flight”, which is expected to be held during the Farnborough Air Show, and will be followed by a comprehensive flight test campaign.
“From the smallest sensor to the most fully-featured tactical system, at SELEX Galileo we understand what makes UAS tick.” said SELEX Galileo CEO Fabrizio Giulianini, adding “We’re proud to be the only European company to have exported a tactical UAS, with its integrated mission system, developed and produced in house, and we expect our next member of the family, the Falco EVO, to enjoy a similar market success.”
The high-end tactical Falco UAS has been flying with international customers in high threat area since 2007.
The Falco TUAS is flexibly designed and can be integrated with a number of different payloads including Electro-Optical and InfraRed (EO/IR) sensors, Synthetic Aperture (SAR) and multimode Radar (picoSAR, Gabbiano T20). These sensors can allow the system to perform highly demanding surveillance missions in low visibility conditions (all weather). When equipped with the company’s PicoSAR radar, the high resolution imagery coupled with change detection make the Falco particularly useful for counter Improvised Explosive Devices (Counter-IED) missions where the system can identify, with extreme accuracy, possible disturbances of the ground surface- The SELEX Galileo’s EW suite SAGE can also be fitted to the UAS, providing high accuracy direction-finding, data-sharing and geo-location capabilities. The Falco EVO, first unveiled last summer, has a bigger wing and boom and other functional improvements, giving the Falco EVO longer endurance and a heavier payload capacity. All the upgrade features of the EVO can be fitted to the standard Falco system, giving existing customers access to the enhanced capabilities.
Source: Press Release