New Delhi: Leading French aircraft manufacturer Airbus and European missile manufacturing major MBDA are coming together to develop demonstrators for Remote Carriers.

This joint venture involves MBDA focusing on the development of small and medium class platforms together and under the lead of Airbus. The Airbus will address the whole Remote Carrier scope and in particular teaming intelligence, whilst focusing on medium to large platforms.

MBDA’s portfolio of capabilities brings complementary expertise into the Airbus led Remote Carrier domain and contribute significantly to the future capabilities of Air Power. As the European champion in missiles, with industrial presence in France, Germany and Spain, MBDA brings in a unique expertise in launching, flying and autonomy of small and large missiles.

Airbus, as a major European player is building on its full scale expertise in small to large systems and in Man-Unmanned Teaming. Among its demonstrators, Airbus has operated since 2006 the Barracuda, a flying test bed for developing technologies and procedures to be used by mature next-generation UAVs to test fast reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting and battle damage assessment capabilities.

Designed to act as force multipliers the Remote Carriers are unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), which aim at reducing the risks for manned aircraft by taking over specific air operations’ roles within high risk environments, providing new air warfare capabilities and teaming in combination with and coordinated by other manned air assets.

The Remote Carriers will complement and augment manned fighter aircraft capabilities performing in close cooperation yet with a high degree of automation to improve the mission performance in high intensity conflicts, and increase the combat mass to better compensate limited numbers of sophisticated manned fighter aircraft.

The Remote Carriers will drastically increase operational capabilities at a very fast pace.