The Indian navy wants to field an unmanned rotorcraft sooner than first thought, triggering a procurement competition even ahead of an existing bilateral development project.
India had been planning on the work with Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) to deliver the naval rotary unmanned air vehicle (NRUAV), a system being developed using Alouette III (Chetak) airframes built by Hindustan Aeronautics Ltd. (HAL). But Indian navy sources say they now urgently need to field at least a small number of vertical-takeoff-and-landing unmanned air systems.
That is bad news for the NRUAV, at least in the short term. IAI has been trumpeting the NRUAV for more than a year. However, delays in its development program, particularly with the autonomous landing system, appear to have contributed to the navy's decision to look for an alternative.
A leading candidate for the program may now be the Northrop Grumman MQ"‘8B Fire Scout. The company has courted the Indian navy for more than two years as part of its expansive international marketing push before the Fire Scout becomes operational in the U.S. this year.
Navy officials have indicated that the Fire Scout is perhaps the only platform available that could fulfill its immediate requirements, since most other unmanned helicopter efforts, including the EADS Orka and Boeing A160 Hummingbird, are still in development. Nevertheless, the road to market for Northrop Grumman now appears to be the request for information (RFI), for which responses are due Sept. 10.
In the run up to the latest turn of events, Northrop Grumman officials questioned the maturity of the Israeli NRUAV approach. In March, Fire Scout Business Development Director Mike Fuqua said that while the company "is aware of the initiative announced by the Indian government regarding NRUAV, we are convinced that once the issues of complexity, capability, maturity and reliability are evaluated, the Indian navy will recognize that Fire Scout will provide the best, most cost-effective, and most rapid [vertical-takeoff UAV] capability for their forces at sea."
Northrop Grumman is hardly the only company eyeing the Indian requirement. In October 2007, Austria's Schiebel demonstrated the performance of the S-100 Camcopter in the Arabian Sea from an Indian Sukanya-class offshore patrol vessel. But the navy RFI calls for a platform with performance parameters that substantially exceed that of the S-100.
The navy has stipulated it wants a vehicle with an operating range of more than 50 nm., endurance of at least 4 hr., a high service ceiling platform and maritime surveillance and signals intelligence payloads. The new system is likely to be weaponized, too.
Nevertheless, the navy's decision to reach out to industry for new ideas has come as a surprise to industry officials since the service traditionally invests and backs programs that have maximum indigenous participation, workshare or technology. The NRUAV program was born of that philosophy: The service asked HAL if it could deliver such a system based on the Alouette III and that request then triggered the dialog with the Israelis, who maintained they could offer a suitable autopilot and were willing to undertake the task as a commercial venture.
In June 2008, then-Indian navy chief Adm. Arun Prakash, who instigated the NRUAV program during his tenure, said, "we had a cheap, simple, reliable, shipborne rotary-wing airframe/engine almost 100% Indian made—the Chetak. Without its two pilots, it would also have a huge payload. HAL wanted a chunk of the action, which was also good. So it looked like a win-win all round."
The IAI-HAL NRUAV is to be capable of over-the-horizon targeting and built with fully redundant systems, all-weather capabilities and sensor flexibility. There have been discussions about optionally weaponizing the platform as well, though the navy has not confirmed this.
If the navy ultimately chooses an import, the new assets will be deployed initially on its indigenous Project 17 stealth frigates and Project 15A destroyers.