Northrop Grumman, SAN DIEGO: Northrop Grumman Corporation successfully demonstrated the ability to release a weapon from a medium-altitude, long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) demonstrator during flight-testing conducted Feb. 24 over Nellis Air Force Base, Nev.
The drop of the 500-pound inert weapon from Proteus, the manned UAV surrogate developed by Scaled Composites, Mojave, Calif., is the latest in a series of company-funded activities focused on addressing the U.S. Department of Defense's expanding medium-altitude endurance UAV requirements. It also supports an on-going, Northrop Grumman-funded effort to develop a new multi-mission MALE UAV dubbed Model 395. Based on Proteus, Model 395 will be able to perform a variety of missions ranging from traditional intelligence gathering to weapons delivery.
