Application of 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 capabilities because of the “lock in” business practices of major prime contractors. The rise of computational tools has not shortened aircraft design and build 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. Blue Force 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 apply this capability to the ADAIR and Next Generation Aerial Target problems by removing the limitations of the existing legacy capabilities – our solution provides 5th generation LO aircraft, representative IRST signature, we use existing commercial technology integrated into a modular airframe, and integrate state of the art payload, avionics and datalink systems. The resulting innovative high-performance vehicle will find use in other emergent applications, like critical logistics for COVID-19 testing and supplies. We provide an open architecture payload design such that any system that fits within the SWaP allocation can be integrated into the aircraft by any party – without requiring OEM control. The aircraft is modular and allows use of wing pods to support further expansion. The wing pods can support up to 1000lbs of critical cargo for rapid transport in a dual-purpose commercial application. Our already-commercialized rapid development workflow allows us to directly build production prototype Y-planes for flight testing and transition to low rate production, producing 100 aircraft in 5 years from the Phase 2 award. This approach has the potential to disrupt the ADAIR and aerial target industries and address the Readiness Gap at a fraction of existing cost while also being adaptable to emergent problems like COVID-19 critical logistics.