UMS Skeldar’s V-200 VTOL UAV Completes Flight Trials in Finland

UMS Skeldar’s V-200 medium-range VTOL UAV has completed five-day long surveillance flight trial demonstrations aboard the OPV Turva as part of the Valvonta2 project led by the Finnish Border Guard and funded by the European Maritime and Fisheries Fund.

The project aims to achieve an understanding of how authorities could use unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for diverse and demanding operations at sea both now and in future scenarios. 

As part of the trials, UMS Skeldar’s V-200 completed multiple operational flights and successfully demonstrated a range of features including automatic take-off and landing (ATOL) capabilities; vessel identification at different ranges and altitudes; search and rescue during both day and night; AIS; and transponder demonstrations. To perform the missions, the Skeldar V-200 was simultaneously carrying a multiple sensor suite of Automatic Identification System (AIS), Wescam MX-8 Electro-Optical and Infrared (EO/IR) sensors as well as the high-capacity Leonardo Pico-SAR Synthetic Aperture Radar.

The platform of choice for maritime-based missions worldwide, the V-200 has been previously selected by the German, Royal Canadian, Belgian and Royal Netherlands Navies, providing embedded ‘eye in the sky’ intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to enhance its capacity to perform primary and secondary missions.