French Military Technology

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Aéronautique : Delair lance une station sol universelle pour drone et prévoit un chiffre d'affaires record

Après avoir fait parler de lui en étant choisi par la DGA pour développer les drones kamikazes de la France, le fabricant de drones Delair annonce la commercialisation d'une station sol universelle pour « 90 à 95% des drones présents sur le marché ». Le tout alors que l'entreprise toulousaine va...
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Delair launches universal drone ground station and forecasts record sales
After making headlines by being chosen by the DGA to develop France's kamikaze drones, drone manufacturer Delair announces the launch of a universal ground station for "90 to 95% of drones on the market". All this at a time when the Toulouse-based company is set to triple its sales in a single year...
Delair, a drone manufacturer based just outside Toulouse, has made a small pivot. At Eurosatory, the international defense trade show currently underway, the company announced the immediate launch of a universal ground station for the drone market.

"We are now offering our customers a ground station, which is our Drako software, the fruit of 13 years of continuous development. No less than 90-95% of the drones on the market use the standards of our solution. With this universal ground station, our ambition is to provide an answer to the multitude of existing control systems, with specific interfaces for each manufacturer", explains Bastien Mancini, Delair's CEO, to La Tribune.

Internally, the Toulouse-based company, which offers three types of aerial drone, uses the same interface for its product range. Its solution will also be used for the two remotely-operated munitions projects, more commonly known as "kamikaze drones", developed with MBDA and KNDS for the Ukrainian army in particular, and for a drone developed in collaboration with Naval Group dedicated to inspection.

"We've had requests from customers and drone operators for this product. Our solution meets a need because the drone market lacks professional ground stations with industrial development. So, with our system, operators only need to be trained once, and it can also be a training tool, as the Drako software is equipped with a flight simulator", continues the man who is now secretary of the French drone industry association (Adif).

No fewer than 30 new hires by 2024

In a way, this is a U-turn for Delair. A few years earlier, the company had developed a software solution for exploiting aeronautical data. Faced with the strong growth of this activity, and due to different cash requirements, the drone manufacturer then decided to separate its historical activity and the marketing of this dedicated data solution. This led to the creation of Alteia in 2020. With the launch of Drako, Delair returns to the software market, but with what ambitions?

"We don't have any financial objectives for the ground station. To begin with, our aim is to make operators aware of how easy it is to use our tool. The drone industry needs visibility, and this universal interface should contribute to that", says Bastien Mancini.

The commercial launch of this solution punctuates a major first half of 2024 in the history of Delair, founded in 2011. After stagnating at between 10 and 11 million euros in sales over the last few years, the year 2024 should see this large Toulouse-based SME land around 30 million euros in sales, according to its management. The company's breakneck growth is partly due to the delivery of several hundred drones to the Ukrainian army.

"In this growth, deliveries to the Ukraine account for 20 to 25% of our business. But the Ukrainian army has often highlighted the quality of our drones, particularly their resistance to GPS jamming, and this has brought us a host of commercial prospects," notes the Toulouse-based entrepreneur.

Faced with this strong demand, Delair, which employs 110 people at its Labège (Haute-Garonne) site, plans to recruit 30 new staff over the next few months. At the same time, the company, which has been buoyed by the defense market for the past 24 months, is aiming to return to a more balanced commercial situation in the long term, with an equal share of civilian and military business. With this in mind, prospects are currently being developed and could come to fruition in 12 to 24 months' time.
 
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Armed with quantum sensors, France eyes leaps in electronic warfare

Quantum gravimeter technology, used for mapping the seabed, offers the prospect of surreptitiously tracking adversary submarines.
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PARIS — The French Navy took delivery of its first serial-produced, quantum-technology sensor this year, a quantum gravimeter used for mapping the seabed, the head of the country’s defense innovation agency AID said. Future uses of such sensors could be for navigation or detecting enemy submarines.
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The agency is also working with Thales on quantum sensors for electronic warfare that will allow monitoring of a broad swath of the electromagnetic spectrum, Patrick Aufort, the head of the agency, told Defense News at last week’s Eurosatory defense show in Paris. Those sensors will be available within the next five years, he said.
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France in 2022 earmarked €1.8 billion, or U.S. $1.93 billion, to develop quantum technologies, a rapidly evolving field that exploits the laws of quantum physics to create new forms of computing, communication and sensing. Quantum gravimeters measure falling, laser-cooled atoms to detect tiny variations in gravitational pull, which could be used to detect the mass of an adversary submarine. There are no methods for submarines to shield themselves from such sensors, according to a 2020 policy brief from the European Leadership Network.
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The gravimeter “is particularly useful for the first applications we’re doing here, mapping the seabed,” Aufort said. “But afterward, we can imagine other uses for the gravimeter, notably for positioning, notably for detecting the existence of a cavity on the seabed.”
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The second development France is working on is quantum-based, electronic-warfare sensors, which will allow for a higher probability of intercepting emissions in the electromagnetic spectrum, including radar and communications, according to Aufort.
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“Quantum technologies allow you to have both a much better resolution on what you’re going to detect and, above all, to have instant detection over a very wide bandwidth,” Aufort said. “You have access to much greater bandwidths, and so a higher probability of interception, because emissions are in fact fleeting."
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Quantum-based electronic warfare sensors can use laser-cooled quantum bits that interact with any incoming electromagnetic waves, measuring tiny changes in a qubit’s quantum state. Today’s analysis relies on rotating through different bands to monitor the entire spectrum.
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Footage has been released of the French Navy's counter-drone and anti-sea drone exercises. The use of an EBRC Jaguar armoured reconnaissance vehicle is also shown, having been loaded onto a ship. Repurposed motorboats and jet skis were used as sea drones. The drones were attacked with all types of weapons, including ABM airburst projectiles

 
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