Textron‘s [TXT] small Aerosonde Uncrewed Aircraft System (UAS) flew off a Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) for the first time, the company announced Monday.
This operation is the start of Textron fulfilling a June 2023 contract to provide UAS support to one Freedom-variant and two
Independence-variant LCSs for the Navy. This UAS took off from the USS Savannah (LCS-28), which is based in San Diego, Calif.
Textron noted with the start of operations off LCS-28, the Aerosonde has now been contracted to support five ship classes and seven overall ships.
“Teaming an uncrewed Aircraft System with a crewed ship is a force multiplier for the ship’s existing mission sets, which we’ve seen with our Aerosonde UAS operating from DDG and ESB– class ships,” Wayne Prender, Textron senior vice president of air systems, said in a statement.
“The expansion of the Aerosonde system’s services onto the LCS extends the capability of the various mission packages employed by the ship,” he added.
The company underscored the Aerosonde family of systems have achieved over 650,000 flight hours over 10 years of operations. It is equipped for multiple payload configurations and can operate in either vertical takeoff and landing to fixed-wing options.
The Aerosonde has a wingspan of 12 feet, weighs 80 pounds, has a range of 75 nautical miles, endurance of over 14 hours, and can hold a payload of up to 20 pounds.
Previously, the Navy started using the first of two Aerosondes off an Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer based in the 7th Fleet in March 2022, with the goal of performing maritime intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) services (Defense Daily, April 4, 2022).
At the time, Prender boasted Aerosonde’ long endurance capabilities make it “an ideal platform” for operations like maritime ISR, search and rescue, and other missions that require real-time situational awareness.
Before that, the Aerosonde operated off the expeditionary sea base ship USS Herschel “Woody” Williams (ESB-4) for years, with operations in the 2nd Fleet.
The Aerosonde is a group 3 UAS operating under a contractor-owned, contractor-operated model so it has up to three personnel to support the UAS on a ship.
Beyond UAS operations, last October, LCS-28 conducted a live-fire demonstration using a containerized launching system to fire a Standard Missile-6 missile at a surface target to demonstrate modularity in LCSs.