On December 23, 2016, the Italians from Leonardo acquired a small company Sistemi Dinamici SpA (founded in 2006), which has good competence in unmanned technologies. Actually, Leonardo was originally engaged in the development of unmanned helicopters with an office from Pisa, but later the situation changed. The market for such rotorcraft, according to the Italians, began to develop rapidly. Still - overseas Northrop Grumman MQ-8C Fire Scout, developed on the basis of a conventional manned vehicle, was successfully adopted by the US Army in several modifications. And the Boeing A 160 Hummingbird, although it ended up out of work, made it possible to try out new solutions in the field of helicopter engineering. Even the Swedes from CybAero managed to build a lightweight piston drone APID 55, and also sold it to the UAE army and several civilian users. It was evident that the delay for Leonardo was like death, and they decided to take into their own hands the program for the development of an unmanned vehicle with two screws.
The new machine, named Aw Hero, was developed on the basis of the promising SD-150 Hero helicopter (due to the sole ownership of the rights to it, it was bought by Sistemi Dinamici). The Italians insured themselves in advance and put the possibility of dual use in the helicopter without a pilot - in the military and civilian sectors. Also, the machine is all-weather and is able to work both on floating airfields and on land. If we consider the peaceful use of Aw Hero, then monitoring and control of pipelines, power lines, fire detection, search operations stand out here. In military terms, the drone can be used as the "heavenly eye" for reconnaissance and target designation, capable of controlling vast territories and water areas - this is now called ISTAR (Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition, and Reconnaissance) abroad.
At the moment, there is no question of any strike weapons of the Italian drone, and this is unlikely - the maximum take-off weight is only 205 kg. In total, the helicopter can lift 15 kg, which can be distributed between optoelectronic surveillance systems, as well as electronic reconnaissance systems. It is assumed that the cargo will be placed on one bow turret and one side turret. In particular, the Gabbiano TS Ultra Light locator, as well as the currently fashionable LIDAR, will take a considerable share of the payload. As one of the options for use, the Italians propose to transport various goods by air, as well as work as a repeater for over-the-horizon communication systems. The dimensions of the Aw Hero are so small that it, with all the infrastructure, can easily fit into a 20-pound sea container, which greatly simplifies its hidden transfer to combat deployment sites.
The vehicle is controlled by the GCS (Ground Control Station), which is a universal "remote control" for NATO drones. According to the Aerospace Review, the communication protocol is STANAG-4586 with AES-25 encryption. This allows you to transfer encoded video in Full HD format. For takeoff and landing, three operating modes are provided at once: under the control of the operator, semi-automatic and 100% independent. At the same time, the car has the ability to land in automatic mode on the ship's decks while the ship is in motion. A drone on such a "leash" can theoretically fly farther than 180 km with a total duration of about 6 hours in the air. The maximum speed of the helicopter is almost 170 km / h with a practical ceiling of 4267 meters. The rotorcraft drone is navigated by the GPS system familiar to NATO countries.
Rotary-winged fighter OCEAN 2020
15 European countries have attracted a total of 42 companies to the implementation of the ambitious OCEAN 2020 (Open Cooperation for European mAritime AwareNess) project, which aims to fully control the coastal waters of the European Union. For only 35 million euros and in three years, the European Defense Agency plans to entangle the coast with a network of mobile and stationary observation posts, in which unmanned helicopters Aw Hero will play one of the most important roles in the air. By early 2021, observer drones are expected to be off the coast of Europe almost everywhere - in the air, on water and under water. The decision to accept the Italian vehicle into the project should be approved based on the results of tests in the Mediterranean and Baltic Seas at the end of 2019 - early 2020. Somewhere at the same time, the European certification of Aw Hero should also pass. In the meantime, the machine from Leonardo Helicopters made several test flights (the first was in December 2018) and continues to search for potential buyers in various defense forums. In particular, the Italians turned to the Australian Navy with an offer to buy in February this year, but so far there has been no positive response. The first contracts for the acquisition of Aw Hero should, obviously, follow after the adoption of the drone in the OCEAN 2020 state, and this is actually a settled issue - there are simply no similar machines for the project in Europe.
Of course, NATO countries will not receive strategic advantages with their Aw Hero, but the trend in the development of unmanned helicopters in Russia should not be overlooked. Moreover, we can still be called the leaders of the world manned aviation industry. And some attempts to eliminate the lag in the field of rotorcraft drones are still visible in our country. There is publicly available information on the development of the VRT-300 coaxial vehicle, which differs from its Italian counterpart in a larger take-off weight and, accordingly, a larger payload - 70 kg. It was presented to the public at Innoprom in Yekaterinburg in 2017, but it seems that the matter did not go further than mock-ups. The vehicle has a very narrow niche of application - Arctic ice reconnaissance in the conditions of the Northern Sea Route. It was based on the icebreaker fleet that determined the choice of the coaxial helicopter scheme. The car never made its first flight - the date was constantly postponed. It is noteworthy that Sberbank offered to use the VRT-300 for the purpose of automated cash transportation by air. Everyone remembers how the similar initiatives of the Russian Post ended with the delivery of parcels using a hexacopter? There is no talk of any military use of the VRT-300, which, most likely, has become the reason for the information vacuum around the project recently. It is quite possible that in Russian Helicopters the project was simply frozen until better times. We are probably waiting for a potential enemy to adopt Aw Hero and similar machines …
