Ukraine's Defense Forces experience in using aerostats on battlefield did not go unnoticed in U.S., where Aerostar company actively conducts testing of its Lightning platform as carrier of UAVs and other payload.
In the past week, company having over 70-year experience creating such stratospheric platforms reported successful testing with balloon carrier of Apollo-R drone from Icarus, optimized for stratospheric flight.
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Against this backdrop, TWZ spoke with Aerostar leadership, publishing additional details regarding company developments. Moreover, this company has active contracts with Pentagon, which uses their balloons.
Overall company offers lineup of four balloons. Smallest: Lightning, which has 1-3 day endurance and can lift 9-20 kg, and Cyclone with endurance up to 36 hours and 56 kg payload capacity.
As well as Thunderhead with flight duration over 60 days and capability to carry 56-90 kg. And also Large Balloon, having maximum payload capacity over 2,000 kg and endurance up to 3-4 days.
Feature of these balloons is capability of controlled movement thanks to changing flight altitude, enabling catching wind of needed direction. Balloon platform control is conducted via satellite communications or direct radio communications and mesh network.
In turn, mentioned Apollo-R stratospheric UAV from Icarus is specially optimized for high-altitude flights reusable drone with solar panels. Its use is considered as another mesh network node. Declared is distance between nodes may reach 160 km and have speed up to 40 Mbit/s.
At the same time, envisioned is specially created stratospheric UAVs can perform various tasks — reconnaissance, EW, signal relay, decoy targets, and also be made in role of kamikaze drones. Overall entire idea revolves around decentralized swarm collective use of balloons as drone carriers and communication nodes, as well as UAVs themselves of various purposes.
In favor of balloon use solution speaks not only their relative cheapness and capability for lengthy operation, but also fact that high flight altitude makes them unreachable for most air defense assets. Moreover, even for long-range SAM systems such targets may be very difficult due to small radar cross-section.
Note Ukraine already uses aerostats. Specifically recently it became known about using these lighter-than-air aircraft in combined rifle brigade of Ukraine Air Forces for increasing flight range of middle strike aircraft-type drones. Also known are experiments with combining Hornet drones with aerostats.
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