Airbus’ Low-cost Drone Interceptor Prepares to Take on Russian/Iranian Kamikaze UAVs

The Airbus ‘Bird of Prey’ interceptor drone successfully completed its first demonstration flight at a military training area in northern Germany.

In a realistic mission scenario, it autonomously searched, detected and classified a medium-sized one-way attack (kamikaze) drone. After successful identification, the Bird of Prey interceptor engaged the target with a Mark I air-to-air missile developed by defence tech start-up partner Frankenburg Technologies.

“Against the current geopolitical and military backdrop, defending against kamikaze drones is a tactical priority that urgently needs to be tackled,” said Mike Schoellhorn, CEO Airbus Defence and Space. “With our Bird of Prey and Frankenburg’s affordable Mark I missiles, we are providing armed forces with an effective, cost-efficient interceptor, filling a crucial capability gap in today’s asymmetric conflict theatres.

The integration of Bird of Prey into Airbus’ air defence battle management suite IBMS acts as a force multiplier.”

“This is a defining step for modern air defence,” said Kusti Salm, CEO of Frankenburg Technologies. ”Together with Airbus, it marks the first integration of a new class of low-cost, mass-manufacturable interceptor missiles onto a drone, creating a new cost curve for air defence and enabling defence against mass aerial threats at a fundamentally different scale.”

Based on a modified Airbus Do-DT25 drone, the Bird of Prey prototype used in the flight features a wingspan of 2.5 metres, a length of 3.1 metres, and a maximum take-off weight of 160 kg.

While the prototype was equipped with four Mark I air-to-air missiles, the operational version will be able to carry up to eight of them. The high-subsonic, fire-and-forget missiles have an engagement range of up to 1.5 kilometres, measure 65 centimetres in length and weigh less than 2 kg each, making them the lightest guided interceptors developed to date.

They are equipped with a fragmentation warhead designed to neutralise targets at short proximity. This will enable the reusable Bird of Prey to engage and neutralise multiple kamikaze drones per mission, at a comparably low cost per kill.