Textron [TXT] recently demonstrated its new Fury weapon system, designed to provide a precision strike capability for the Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle, other small UAVs and even manned helicopters and jets.
A pair of successful live-fire demonstrations last month at Yuma Proving Ground in Arizona showed Marine Corps and Army observers that weaponizing the Shadow M2 UAV is not only possible without hindering the UAV’s performance, but could also be manufactured and introduced to the fleet in short order, Christian Leimkuehler, vice president of precision weapons systems, told Defense Daily on Tuesday at the Modern Day Marine military expo.
“Dating back to 2011, (Textron’s) Unmanned Systems was working with the U.S. Marine Corps on weaponization of Shadow project. Since then, we’ve kind of internalized that – we’ve looked at the Shadow as, this is an additional capability you can add into Shadow, therefore extending its life, extending its capability for the operator,” Leimkuehler said.
Since Textron also built the Shadow, he said the company had the knowledge of Shadow and of precision munitions–through previous partnerships with Thales UK–to craft an integrated system instead of simply tacking a bomb onto a UAV.
“[Fury] was designed specifically for the small UAS, which means we minimized the impact to the platform endurance, and that’s all the way from the weapon to the carriage system…all the way up through the platform,” Leimkuehler said, noting that Textron saw less than an 8 percent impact to the Shadow’s endurance during company-funded testing.
The Fury weapon is a derivative of the Textron/Thales UK Lightweight Multirole Missile, and the two companies began their work on the Fury iteration in March 2013. Within five months of starting the project, they integrated the weapon and UAV and conducted the first pair of drops at Yuma with inert rounds guided by the semi-active laser (SAL) guidance system. The second pair of tests paired Fury with the Shadow 200 UAV, and this most recent pair of drops were the first live-fire tests of the weapon system.
“Eventually we are going to move on to a moving-target demonstration with the capability. There should be no reason why we couldn’t do that–SAL capability, GPS-guided into a basket, so we’ve got the ability to laze from on the platform or laze from a third-party designator,” Leimkuehler said.
Textron will continue to look for other applications of Fury–it has displayed Fury missiles on a Hellfire rail, which could provide light-attack helicopters or fighter jets another option and a deeper magazine when engaging certain targets, Leimkuehler said.
“We’re still working with the government, working on helping develop their requirements and it’s kind of the government’s next move,” he said. “The weapon’s ready today, it’s a [technology readiness level] 7 capability, all that’s left is bringing the weapon through production.”