Lockheed Martin eyes Fury enhancements, Middle East customer

[Zarvan]

The Fury's blended-wing airframe features an internal payload bay. Source: Lockheed Martin

Lockheed Martin is undertaking a range of enhancements to its Fury unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and anticipates an order for the platform this summer.

Brendan Rhatigan, unmanned systems site director at the company's San Luis Obispo facility, told Jane's that the development is focusing on improvements to the aircraft's engine. Fury is currently fitted with a two-stroke diesel engine.

"We are in the middle of doing some reliability updates and tweaking the performance of the engine to go after the 15-hour endurance goal, and we'll test it this summer and see where we end up, but that is what we're shooting for," Rhatigan said.

Rhatigan said that during tests the aircraft has been flown for more than 12 hours and could have operated for longer. "We landed with some fuel in the tank, so we estimate that we are probably in the mid-13-hour range if we had gone all the way to the bingo fuel level.

"The reliability upgrades we have made to the two-stroke engine are under test right now. We're doing accelerated life testing to characterise the performance and we will put the [improved] engine on a vehicle for flight testing in the July timeframe," Rhatigan said.

The engine is a commercial-off-the-shelf unit that is heavily modified for its application on Fury.

In late 2016 tests were held at the Dugway Proving Ground in Utah in conjunction with the US Army. These saw the aircraft fly an operationally representative flight profile that involved transit to an area of operations, loiter on station, and return to a capture point.

The flight tests also saw the aircraft configured with its maximum load. Rhatigan explained that Fury has a gross weight of 435 lb (197 kg), with the vehicle itself weighing around 235 lb without payload and fuel systems, "You have 200 lb of payload and fuel to play with."

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