Source : IgMp Bureau

Royal Air Force American MQ-9 Predator (Image Copyright on the picture)

Today we will inform you everything about the High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) class drone under development by DRDO’s lab Aeronautical Development Establishment (ADE) for the Indian Armed Forces, we have broken the news about this UAV in December last year. This drone will be in same class of American MQ-9 Predator drone which the Indian Armed Forces eagerly want to acquire for attacking role.

Everything about New UAV under development by DRDO-ADE

Normally when we talks about Armed Drones, then those are MALE (Medium Altitude Long Endurance) UAVs which operates upto 30,000 feet height. DRDO’s Rustom-2 (TAPAS MALE UAV) and Archer SR-UAV or Israeli Heron TP UAVs all belongs to this category of MALE UAVs, while American Predator which Indian Armed Forces eagerly wants to acquire belongs to HALE category, and now DRDO and ADE’s new Armed UAV will be of the same class of HALE category, which has already entered its second phase of development.

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DRDO invited defence manufacturers to submit their technology proposals for the proposed DRDO-ADE HALE UAV 2022 Project in January this year (DRDO)

DRDO’s lab ADE is working on a twin boom single engine UAV. There was no official report or informations available on public domain about this UAV and it was thought that this UAV is in its Initial Design Phase and during the past couple of months it has successfully completed its design phase and has now entered its second developmental phase. In the second phase, the design of the UAV will be refined further, then a CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis will be carried out on the design and after that on the basis of these tests a Wind Tunnel model will be prepared on which High Speed and Low Speed Wind Tunnel testing will be carried out. And as per some sources the CFD analysis has already been carried out and IIT-Kanpur has been instructed to build another refined Wind Tunnel model of this UAV.

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Development Partner IIT-Kanpur

IIT-Kanpur apart from being a Top Engineering Institute, it also boasts of some advanced capabilities in Aeronautical Engineering and the works they have carried out on Unmanned Systems whether be it Ghatak UAV, Unmanned Helicopter or Drone Swarm. IIT-Kanpur was an obvious choice for the development partner of HALE UAV.

Proposed DRDO-ADE HALE Class UAV (Image Source : DRDO)

Current Status of Development

As far as Indian drone development is concerned, as of now Indiaofficially has two drone projects that is Archer SR-UAV (Formerly Rustom-1) and Rustom-2 or TAPAS BH-002 UAV both belongs to MALE class. These drone can carry maximum 2-4 Anti Tank Guided Missiles (ATGMs) but they can not carry other types of payloads like laser guided bombs as Rustom-2 TAPAS UAV can carry a maximum of 350kg payload. While American MQ-9 Predator can carry 10 times more payload than the Rustom-2, and we didn’t have any drone project of that scale, but now DRDO-ADE’s HALE class UAV can address that. But one thing is not clear here and that is the timeline, about the induction of this new HALE Class Armed UAV by ADE-DRDO.

Details about the new HALE UAV

The information we have about the details of the drone is as follows : The design of this drone will be twin boom just like Israeli Heron TP drones, a single engine will be used and the engine will be used is most probably Honeywell Garrett TPE 331 which is used on HTT-40 and Dornier-228 and by using this engine India will have commonality with HTT-40 and Dornier in maintenance and logistics. This will reduce logistical costs, in fact a variant of this engine is used in American MQ-9 Reaper.

Features of the proposed DRDO-ADE HALE UAV

India has already mastered automatic take-off landing and SATCOM which will reduce the timeline of the development of this new drone but we have to understand one thing that this drone is in very first stage of development and the actual system may require much more time to come in reality and during this time if the Indian Armed Forces goes ahead in procuring some units of the American MQ-9 Predators then don’t be surprised.

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