Insitu’s ScanEagle, Integrator and RQ-21A Blackjack Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) hit a collective one million operational flight hours during the last week of July.
Beyond this corporate benchmark, the aircraft are receiving technology upgrades and are expanding their presence in order of battles in the Asia-Pacific and elsewhere, asianmilitaryreview.com learned during a media event hosted by the company.
Ryan Hartman, Insitu’s president and chief executive officer, candidly noted that even with his years of experience in this sector “I am always surprised, and at the same time never surprised, by the new application or the new payload that we can bring to the table.” Accordingly, when the Integrator platform was designed, “we designed it with a very large and empty payload bay. We designed it that way because we knew there were going to be these ‘unknown’ missions that we can support for both commercial and defence customers.” What’s next? “We would add to our portfolio, payloads that are being designed and developed by third parties specifically for Insitu platforms,” Mr. Hartman observed: “We have a portfolio of more than 100 payloads, most of which are developed without any interaction with us, which is pretty exciting to think there are companies designing payloads for Insitu products without interacting with us, that’s how it is designed.”
Insitu’s UAVs and complementary services have been delivered to defence forces around the world: “We first started within the Pacific region in supporting the Australian Defence Force. Through our team in Australia we’ve been supporting the Republic of Singapore Navy, operations in Japan and are looking forward to future opportunities in Japan. In addition, we’ve been supporting the Malaysians, and are really starting to expand that business there.”
