28 the control surfaces would be smothered, but that’s just one of many ways the NATO regulators separate the wheat from the chaff. We’ve done countless other tests and broken several airframes along the way.” While these tests have made pursuit of Type Certification long and costly, Primoco anticipates it will make getting European defence tenders easy in the long run, given that so few UAVs have such certification (and none have an MTOW close to Primoco’s). The options are few for any European NATO armed forces looking for a heavy UAS that can be deployed and operated without specific authorisation. “In early 2022, we were asked by the German Army to perform a trial flight in non-segregated airspace over Ingolstadt Manching Airport, but they wanted us to do it under a civilian certification,” Fojtik recounts. “We flew for several days using the LUC – we’d applied for a SORA, but our LUC came before it was processed – and that’s made our UAV the only one in its weight category to fly in Germany since civilian regulations came into effect.” Just a few years ago, trying to fly in Germany using a Czech UAV with a Czech-granted certification would have been impossible, such is the scale of the change brought on by the LUC. The One 150 captured a huge amount of test surveillance data, with extensive tracking of ground and air vehicles moving over Ingolstadt Manching (including a rare sighting of an Airbus Beluga in descent 10 km away), with 100% navigational accuracy. “Although we flew on the LUC, most of our prospective customers are military-focused, particularly agencies responsible for border or coastal monitoring, intelligence and law enforcement, so the STANAG is still a primary focus,” Fojtik says. As an indication of its capabilities, many units of the One 150 are currently flying in active war zones, the company having volunteered its assistance on a pro bono basis in at least one conflict. These are non-lethal operations including ISR and long-endurance missions through jammed and heavily contested airspace, and also over contested and occupied territories. While the total number of One 150s in such service is classified, more than 100 units have been sold, including to customers in Europe and elsewhere. An almost-stealth aircraft Fojtik describes the One 150’s engineering as “almost stealth aircraft” territory. Externally, the design looks conventional, with two high aspectratio fixed wings and a twin tail boom, both dimensioned with constant chord. It hence bears outward similarities to Baykar Tech’s Bayraktar TB2, and to the Leonardo Falco UAV (featured in issue 5, December 2015/January 2016) under Selex ES’ ownership. The One 150 runs on the Primoco 340 engine, a 340 cc four-stroke, four cylinder, and is a notable departure in configuration, displacement and other respects from the Primoco 500 twostroke we detailed in issue 17 (December 2017/January 2018). The engine is integrated at the rear with a pusher propeller, with its exhaust routed into the propeller vortex so that August/September 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The GCS can be mounted in a truck for mobile operations. It runs UAV Navigation’s Visionair autopilot software, and its four screens provide redundancy in case one computer should fail Each wing contains two beams – a main and an ancillary – running its internal length for structural robustness, with about 12 ribs inside each wing along the lengths of the beams
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