The Falco tactical UAV System
Selex ES, a Finmeccanica company, has signed a contract worth over €40m to deliver the Falco system to a Middle East country. The Company will also provide operational and maintenance support to the customer for 12 months of the contract performance.
Falco is an operationally-proven, tactical, medium altitude, medium endurance Unmanned Aerial System for defence and security surveillance applications, designed to supply a net-centric command and control with a tactical overview of the operational scenario and target cueing in real time.
Currently operated by a range of international customers in diverse and extreme climate and geographical conditions, the Falco system is a field-proven asset that can be easily integrated within existing air management infrastructures and is delivered to its customers with a comprehensive set of operational and logistic support services including pilots, sensors and mechanical operators training, advanced logistic support, battlelab simulators for CONOPS development.
A comprehensive suite of payloads, including AESA radar and electro optic turrets, equip Falco to perform a 24/7 all-weather wide range of missions. It features ramp take-off, fully automatic short take-off and landing capabilities and day/night flight and navigation, plus a NATO-compliant Ground Control Station enabling mission planning, re-tasking and data exploitation.
Falco’s reliability, maturity, flexibility and extended capability allow the vehicle to perform roles at the top end of the tactical UAS category. The system features a fault-tolerant architecture which addresses the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) airworthiness guidelines for both civil and military oriented products. The aircraft can be flown in manual and in fully automatic mode, including automatic take-off and landing operations.
The ground data terminal provides a higher-than-200km redundant link range between the GCS and the Falco air vehicle, through a jam-resistant option data transmission in real time.
“We welcome this new contract for our field proven Falco UAS that confirms the operational reliability and performance of the system, from the sensors to the mission system, -delivering outstanding 24/7 all weather, day and night surveillance,” said Fabrizio Giulianini, CEO of Selex ES, adding “This year has been an exciting year for our UAS capability, thanks to follow on contracts for our unmanned surveillance service business, flight campaigns of our top of the range Falco EVO and the acquisition of a launch customer for our platform agnostic SkyISTAR mission system.”
