Under a contract awarded by the UK Ministry of Defence, BAE Systems will be the industry lead and prime contractor of a joint ?124 million project to develop a world-class UAV (Unmanned Air Vehicle) Technology Demonstrator Programme called Taranis.
BAE Systems, together with Rolls-Royce, Smiths Aerospace and QinetiQ, will work alongside MoD military staff and scientists to develop and fly Taranis, named after the Celtic God of Thunder. The four-year Taranis project, part of the UK Government?s Strategic Unmanned Air Vehicle (Experimental) Programme [SUAV(E)], will result in a UAV with fully integrated autonomous systems and low observable features.

About the size of a BAE Systems Hawk, Taranis will provide the MoD with experimental evidence on the potential capabilities of this class of UAV and help to inform decisions on the future mix of manned and unmanned fast jet aircraft.

Taranis is jointly funded by the UK MoD and UK industry, and will bring together a number of technologies, capabilities and systems to produce a technology demonstrator based around a fully autonomous intelligent system. Ground testing of Taranis is expected to take place in early 2009 with the first flight trials taking place in 2010.

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