The head of the U.S. Department of Defense’s Strategic Capabilities Office (SCO) said Sept. 8 that he plans to decide in about a year whether Perdix, an expendable “micro” unmanned aerial vehicle that is launched from a flare dispenser, is mature enough to be handed over to a military service.
“The real question for Perdix will be, at the end of this next fiscal year, is it ready for transition to the Air Force,” said William Roper, SCO’s director. “Things that the Air Force would care about are the loiter time of the UAV, how long does it last, how fast does it fly, how reliable is it.”
Built from commercial components and roughly the length of a man’s hand, Perdix is tested almost monthly and has flown more than 500 times, some of which involved F-16s and F/A-18s deploying the tiny UAV from the air, Roper said. Perdix is intended for surveillance missions, and SCO envisions that swarms of them could allow a fast-moving fighter to search areas it would have trouble checking out otherwise.
Perdix, which is named after a character from Greek mythology, has gone through seven generations of design, incorporating feedback from training exercises, including Northern Edge in Alaska. At a media roundtable, Roper displayed a fourth-generation version equipped with a smartphone camera.
The propeller-pushed aircraft is placed in a protective canister before being launched from a flare dispenser. Perdix then pops out of the canister and unfolds its retractable forward and rear wings to begin flying its mission.
“We’ve designed it for speed and we’ve designed it for all-weather conditions, but the numbers for the speed and the endurance are numbers that we protect,” Roper said. “Part of the reason for building Perdix is to try to give the commanders” an element of surprise.