Rapid Prototype Program for Unmanned Aerial Systems to Generate Low-Cost 4th- and 5th- Generation Threat Replication

Today’s aerospace industry struggles to rapidly design, experiment, and field novel aerospace and defense capabilities because of the “lock in” business practices of major prime contractors. The rise of computational tools has not shortened design and build timelines over the last 50 years because their use has been offset by a “hard tooling” mindset investing in overly durable and complex tooling for 30-year production runs and 10,000 hour plus airframe life. Nearly all aircraft are expected to have multiple service life extensions due to the enormous non-recurring and recurring cost. Blue Force Technologies Inc. (BFT) has developed a digital rapid development workflow to attack this constraint for our commercial aerospace customers. We have already commercialized this offering and have proven the ability to transition from concept to flight test in one year followed by direct transition to low-rate production. We have applied this process to the development of capability for the ongoing Adversary Air problem – our solution provides 5th generation LO aircraft, representative IRST signature, we use existing commercial technology integrated into a modular airframe and integrate Open Architecture state of the art electronics systems. In this effort we adapt and extend our approach to attritable-class aircraft, defined as under $10 million per copy in production. The focus is on novel use of materials – often overlooked or long ago ruled out due to anticipated lifetimes – coupled with a minimal tooling approach. The approach directly addresses the need to reconsider manufacturing techniques and materials in the context of the requirements associated with attritable-class aircraft – low cost, high performance, and the ability to manufacture quickly while trading away long lifetime airframes.   BFT created this innovative concept to use unmanned aircraft capable of emulating 5th generation threats for adversary air and aerial target applications under Phase 1 and Phase 2 SBIR contacts with the USAF. In collaboration with Air Combat Command (ACC) and AFRL/RQ the concept was advanced through preliminary design review and an Iron-Bird was developed to demonstrate the semi-autonomous flight capabilities as well as the Guidance-Navigation-Control system. Analysis and design tasks have been completed under the previous contracts that have validated that this technology capability provides the ability to save the USAF hundreds of millions of dollars annually while also enabling the USAF to achieve their need for 100,000 sorties per year of threat relevant presentations. This capability is enabled by BFTs digital design workflow coupled with our Advanced Rapid Prototyping system that allows us to quickly conceptualize, design, model, analyze, simulate, tool and build defense relevant aircraft. In this effort BFT will build four aircraft and conduct ground, load and extensive flight testing in a relevant Beyond Visual Range (BVR) environment.