Firms vie for share of growing unmanned plane market
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A drawdown of U.S. troops in Iraq may slow sales of some unmanned aerial vehicles after years of exponential growth, but demand from civilian agencies and foreign countries will underpin the market for years to come, industry and defense officials said on Tuesday.
Northrop Grumman Corp, maker of the high-altitude Global Hawk, and privately held General Atomics, which makes the Predator and Warrior unmanned planes, are among hundreds of companies showing off drones, robots and sensors at the world's largest unmanned systems conference in Washington this week.
Northrop and General Atomics dominate the unmanned airplane market, but many other companies are vying for a share of a market that the Virginia-based Teal Group estimates will be worth $62 billion over the next decade.
Tim Owings, the Army's deputy project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, said the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were clearly defined by the use of unmanned systems, much the way that Vietnam became known as the helicopter war.
"Before, unmanned aerial vehicles were sort of this thing off on the side of intelligence," he told the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International conference. "Now it's part and parcel of everything we do. It's totally changed the way the Army fights, and the Marine Corps too."
Unmanned aircraft are used far more widely these days for surveillance, and also to bomb enemy targets, search for roadside bombs, protect convoys, relay communications, collect signals intelligence, and resupply troops, he said.
Owings said unmanned systems accounted for about 40 percent of the Army's flying hours now, up from around four percent in the early days of the wars. The Army was now logging about 20,000 to 25,000 flight hours a month with its drones, and had nearly reached 850,000 flight hours in total, he said.
Phil Finnegan, a Teal Group analyst, said the unmanned vehicle sector was a growth area for the industry, along with homeland security and cybersecurity, at a time when overall defense sales are expected to level off.
"It's become a real market. It's definitely not a fad," he said, noting that some companies were initially hesitant to get into the market because there simply weren't enough orders to merit the needed investment, but those had now materialized.
Now many companies were scrambling for a foothold, he said, but they faced an uphill climb, given that a few players like General Atomics, Northrop, and AeroVironment already dominated the medium-, high-altitude, and handheld markets.
Boeing Co, which created a separate unmanned aircraft division in June, on Tuesday acknowledged other companies might have a head start, but said it brought considerable integration skills to the market and would also focus heavily on offering affordable solutions.
Boeing's Insitu unit builds the small ScanEagle unmanned vehicle that recently surpassed 200,000 flight hours for the Navy and was used last April to help rescue the captain of a U.S. freighter who had been taken hostage by pirates.
Todd Gautier, senior vice president for L-3 Communications Holdings Inc, also cited great interest in Mobius, a new medium-altitude, long-endurance plane developed by L-3 that can be used either with a pilot or without.
He said L-3, which already makes a wide array of components for unmanned vehicles, developed the plane based on an existing design over the past two years.
The plane, which had its first public flight at an event hosted by the U.S. Navy on Monday, can carry up to 1,000 pounds of weapons and can stay in the air for up to 24 hours. It costs about half that of competitor planes, he said. Continued...
