Boeing [BA] subsidiary Insitu could release its ScanEagle 2 unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in 2016, according to a senior company official.
Insitu ScanEagle Product Line Director Don Williamson told Defense Daily Tuesday the company’s follow-up to its popular ScanEagle UAV was in the final development stages. Williamson said a highlight of ScanEagle 2 will be its clean sheet-designed, two-stroke engine created by Australia’s Orbital, which Insitu selected from among 52 companies in a global search to design ScanEagle 2’s engine.
Williamson said Insitu downselected its potential engine developers to five companies, visited them all and found Orbital to be “clearly the best” in small engines.
“They had the best technology that we could find in the world, and to date, they’ve done a phenomenal job,” Williamson said at the Surface Navy Association (SNA) conference in Arlington, Va.
Orbital’s engine is a 50cc engine with the ability to perform both on heavy fuels, such as JP-5 or JP-8, and gasoline. Williamson said the ability to perform on different types of fuels is especially important to the company’s naval customers, both United States and international. The engine propeller is also custom designed, he said, and features increased electrical capability to provide over 150 watts of payload power.
ScanEagle 2 will feature an ethernet-based architecture a capacity to support more advanced payloads. Williamson said it will also use the same ICOMC2 command and control (C2) user interface as Insitu’s Integrator 80 pound-class UAV. A full-digital video system will provide improved image quality.
ScanEagle 2 will feature more than 16 hours of endurance, a ceiling of 19,500 feet and a cruise speed of 50-60 knots. As an empty structure, ScanEagle 2 will weigh about 42 pounds, but its max takeoff weight will be nearly 52 pounds and its max payload weight about eight pounds.
ScanEagle 2 will also feature the same catapult-style launching ability as ScanEagle and Integrator as well as recover on the same sky hook. Williamson said this will lower overall lifecycle costs as the infrastructure is the same for all three vehicles.