Aviation Week & Space Technology | By: Graham Warwick | May 15 – 28 2017:
Airbus, Boeing and Lockheed push to break into the commercial unmanned—aircraft market the growing commercial unmanned aircraft market, but rather than developing new vehicles they are targeting the business of providing services to large customers.
Airbus has formed a U.S.-based company called Airbus Aerial to bring together commercial satellite and unmanned-aircraft remote-sensing capabilities to provide data collection and image-processing services to large and global enterprises.
A year after forming a commercial business unit, Boeing’s subsidiary Insitu has unveiled a revamped suite of products and services aimed at large customers that includes the parent company’s satellite-imaging and unmanned surface and subsurface vehicle capabilities.
Major aerospace companies are bidding for a stake in Airbus Aerial will bring together satellite imaging with data from different classes of UAS.
Lockheed Martin is developing an inspection services business built around a commercial version of the Stalker XE small military unmanned aircraft system (UAS) and focused on linear inspection of pipe-lines, power lines and rail tracks as well as environmental monitoring.
General Atomics Aeronautics Systems, meanwhile, is assessing the commercial market as it develops a type-certifiable version of the Predator B medium-altitude, long-endurance UAS called the SkyGuardian.
Small military UAS producer AeroVironment will begin selling a small commercial drone, Quantix, and data analytics to the agricultural market later this year.
Large UAS maker Northrop Grumman, meanwhile, says it has no interest in the commercial market.
Airbus is seeking to gain traction in an unmanned-aircraft market where it has struggled to establish a foothold
because of a fragmented European defense market.
The others are looking for a way to expand out of a defense market that has slowed in the U.S. as industry waits for
the Pentagon to launch development of the next generation of military UAS.
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