Article Posted on : - Nov 30, 2010

NEW DELHI (BNS): India’s premier defence agency DRDO is developing an unmanned combat aerial vehicle (UCAV), which it has named ‘Aura’.

Three DRDO laboratories – the Aeronautical Development Agency (ADA), the Aeronautical Development Establishments (ADE) and the Defence Avionics and Research Establishment (DARE) – have joined hands to design and develop Aura.

The flight control system and data link packages of Aura will be designed and developed jointly by ADE and Defence Electronic Application Laboratory, Dehradun, according to Technology Focus, a bi-monthly journal published by DRDO.

The unmanned aircraft will fly at altitudes of 3,000 feet with payloads. It will have short take-off and landing capability on prepared runway, the journal said, elaborating on the combat drone’s key features.

Earlier in September, P S Subramanyam, project director and chief of ADA, had said that all technologies required for the UCAV had been identified, and the most important of them were its flying wing and stealth technology.

The combat drone, which will be able to detect and identify targets, and even fire weapons at them, will be controlled with command and control centres (CCC) spread across the country, DRDO Chief, V K Saraswat had revealed last year.

Meanwhile, the capability of the advanced Laser Guidance Bomb kit ‘Sudarshan’, which has been designed to improve the accuracy of air-to-ground bombing by Indian Air Force, has been enhanced.

“The development of the (LGB) kit has matured to the level of guiding the bomb within 10 m CEB (Circular Error Probability) from its otherwise 400 m to 1000 m fall-off the target.

“Indian Air Force has shown keen interest in buying hundreds of these kits. The extension of kit’s capability to further increase its range using global positioning system (GPS) INS is going on,” the Technology Focus reports.