BAE Mantis-yet another UK UAV

BAE Systems is certainly taking this UAV malarky seriously. In addition to the 6 previous UAV's they revealed after testing they announced the Taranis last year, and this years announcement is this, the Mantis, which rather reminds of a twin engined Predator/Reaper type aircraft. Which is what it is of course, albeit an entirely different design.

One difference between the Mantis and other similar types is that it is intended to be fully autonomous. That is without input from a ground based pilot at any stage of the mission, a fact that manges to be impressive and scary at the same time, like my wifes bosom.

Anyhow, I thought it was odd that nothing about this project seemed to have surfaced on here yet so I thought I'd do it.

The pictures show a design model and the full size mock up revealed at Farnborough. Impressively this has been under development for some time and ther real prototype will roll out before the end of this year and fly in early 2009.

The wings of the Mantis are built by BAE brough, who will be glad of the work now that nobody wants Hawks anymore, while the body is made by Lola, who normally make formula 1 racing cars, cool!

The mock up also shows Mantis is intended to carry out attack missions as well as recce flights and displays the Brimstone and LGB's that BAE hopes it can be trusted to drop in the right place.

I must say I like it, it reminds me of the Argi/Brazilian CBA 123 regional airliner project of the early nineties in layout.

I do hope BAE's seemingly endless run of UAV/UCAV prototypes lead to some actual operational hardware eventually though.

Very nice concept they're working on. Now is it going to be fully automated then? Methinks this may be requiring some high matinence(spelling?) before they really get it battle ready. I can't wait for them to come up with an A-10 version of one of these.
Oh yeah: sourcing please?

Absolutely beautiful looking machine. Boeing never ceases to amuse me with the awesome names for their UAV's. It would be pretty cool if they outfitted that thing as some type of Close Air Support vehicle (ala A-10) or something of that sort.

Great find!

[edit on 27-7-2008 by DrOOpieS]

Waynos;

They’ve also added the Ampersand autogyro and GA22 lighter than air UAVs to their portfolio. The base GA22 design was bought from Per Lindstrand and will be modified to provide an autonomous capability. The Ampersand is based on the Rotorsport MT-03 designed which is being test flown this year in a manned configuration with unmanned to follow next year. Both of these, as far as I know, are intended as commercial offerings rather than demonstrators.

It is also being speculated that the cancellation of plans to purchase a further 10 Reapers was in anticipation of Mantis’ arrival. Personally I think the reason it exists as a demonstrator at all is because they wouldn’t have been able to get a procurement programme approved. But by doing it in steps it appears more palatable to those holding the purse strings. Otherwise there’s little reason for Mantis to exist at all since it will merely take advantage of technology already demonstrated in past aircraft as well as Taranis.

In addition to these they also have Fury and are sponsoring the FLAVIIR project which will result in a subscale demonstrator of a flapless UAV called Demon to fly next year (this has been preceded by a series of smaller scale test aircraft).

They’ve really come from nowhere to a significant player in the industry, some may even say a leader.


Spec_Ops;

Actually BAE’s HERTI has already flown fully autonomous missions in Afghanistan as part of the UK’s UAV Battle Lab Project Morrigan with apparent great success. Flight International is reporting that this may be repeated with Mantis.

Interesting that they would go with a T-tail design. to explain to those who don't understand why a T-tail aircraft has problem here goes my best shot. Any T-tail aircraft has a critical AoA or Stall point where the horizontal stabilizer mounted atop the vertical fin, and the all-important rudder will be unable to function due to the turbulent airflow off the wings which are inline with the tail section at a High pitch angle.
Experience shows that the resulting violent stall will produce an attitude that a pilot won't recover from -- not without a tail- chute deployment that could change the balance of forces. The critical wing AoA for deep stall on the Trident, 727 and DC9 was quite high, around 30 to 35 degrees.
So why design A UCAV that may be lost due to a simple issue when at this point I don't see what positives they would get from this design that is normally used for transport aircraft that need the clearances etc.

I find it difficult to judge how scary and impressive this aircraft is without something to compare it to. Perhaps Waynos could provide us with a photo of his good lady wife's bosom. This would of course be purely for scientific purposes and in the interests of advancing the understanding of aviation technology.

It actually looks to me like the hump at the front of the UAV is actually just a grayed out cockpit for a pilot to sit - maybe thats what they did to get it to past the tests and get funding lol just stuck a pilot in there with a couple of monitors to fly it I am being light hearted but it really does look like that! If it is sensor equipment, why isn't bulging underneath or at least more forwards?

Spec_ops_wannabe, here are two sources, the first was a 'reveal preview' on Flight's website. The second is an article on The Register which manages to spectacularly miss the point in a couple of places but might be interesting to read anyway

Flight
The Register

a google will by now give several more sources I think.

Dr00pieS - BAE, not Boeing, and yes, CAS is indeed part of the mission portfolio.

Mike - Thanks for that extra input, I have wondered as well if our purchase of Reapers hasn't too many strings attached as the US does retain a lot of control over these aircraft as far as I can tell. They wear our colours but they aren't really ours to use as we wish. Mantis could be the way around this for us perhaps.

Canada - isn't the deep stall phenomenon now completely sorted as far as commercial transports go? there are certainly many hundreds of T tail regional aircraft in service and no VC 10 has been lost because of it in over 45 years of service. The computers flying the plane will be well able to avoid a deep stall I would imagine if similar systems can let pilots throw the Typhoon around the sky with no regard for whether a manouvre is actually possible or not

Fang, you will just have to take my word for it, I cannot be held responsible for the effect it would have on your mental stability if I were to unleash such a sight.

primamateria - that seems to be the way UAV's are designed. The predator and the Global Hawk also have that same curvature. maybe part of it is that the sensitive bits are protected and out of the way in a crash landing? So why did god let my sensitive bits dangle on the outside?

Originally posted by waynos
Canada - isn't the deep stall phenomenon now completely sorted as far as commercial transports go? there are certainly many hundreds of T tail regional aircraft in service and no VC 10 has been lost because of it in over 45 years of service. The computers flying the plane will be well able to avoid a deep stall I would imagine if similar systems can let pilots throw the Typhoon around the sky with no regard for whether a manouvre is actually possible or not

primamateria - that seems to be the way UAV's are designed. The predator and the Global Hawk also have that same curvature. maybe part of it is that the sensitive bits are protected and out of the way in a crash landing? So why did god let my sensitive bits dangle on the outside?

Good to see you online waynos. As for the Deep stall the fact that the computer and handling of the planes has gotten better is a given. But the issue for me is that it does exist and airframes can be lost to it. What you mentioned though about the computers being used and so on does make me think that the unrecoverable is now recoverable. Wonder what changed when they put a computer in control.

Oh also to clear it up for you and primamateria about the global hawk and the new Mantis hump at the front here you go. I assume the reasons are similar.

And that I believe is how they get and keep the sat uplink what type of dish eludes my memory. But it needs to be able to traverse fully and track the sat hence the need for it to be on the top and lots of room to move.

reply to post by waynos


Oh well. The Monday I'm having it may well send me over the edge. I was interested in the debate about T tail and stalling. Didn't the Argentinian Pucara (a low slow COIN turboprop) have this arrangement?

reply to post by Canada_EH


Canada;

Wouldn’t a low mounted tail be more adversely affected by the turbulent air from the engines which are ironically placed where they are to make the design more acceptable to the more safety driven civilian market. Might that explain the design choice?

I can’t claim to know much about the technical aspects but the pics would suggest to me that Mantis would have to achieve a very high angle of attack before the airflow from the wing would begin to interfere with the tail. I can’t think of many circumstances where something like Mantis would need to achieve that degree of attack.

Having said that I believe that BAE has said that Mantis isn’t necessarily what a production system would look like. I don’t think that means it’ll change into a Dark Star but more minor changes might very well take place.

Canada - to lend some anecdotal support to your T-tail design "flight characteristics" claim:

My dad used to fly the F-104 (G, specifically). I used to peruse his instruction manuals, as he was an instructor to the Luftwaffe pilots at Luke and brought the books home. The procedure for any type of a stall/spin or any situation that might lead to any of the above was "EJECT". Not "Try A, try B" - just "EJECT".

reply to post by HatTrick


So I'm assuming that they did not expect a stall from a T-tail to be recoverable?

My stall procedures usually went "Let go of the flight controls, allow the nose to dip down, give full throttle, let the plane recover by itself." Essentially, all we did was dip the noise and give it gas.

Guess that doesn't work with all plane designs. And not in all situations.

Shattered OUT...

Not the 104 as far as I know. It would probably take 10,000 ft to recover.

The 'UK' reapers are actually controlled from the US. However this is more likely to do with the most reliable sat uplink and the need to keep costs down by not spending on a control centre in the UK than US interference. It is an RAF team who work at the US centre. I suspect that if the US didn't want the Reapers to be used in some way we would have no choice but to accept it which means that having the Mantis would be ideal as well as for use in certain intelligence situations that we'd rather the US didn't know, e.g. IRA surveillance seeing as the CIA funded and provided weapons for the IRA.

Mantis the 'killer' drone

Article in the daily Mail with photos.

www.flightglobal.com...

Pictures of it in final assembly

Hi all, is there any pictures of engine which powers BAE Mantis? I heard that Rolls-Royce has developed an engine named RB2023 to power this UAV. Please any of you know anything about this engine?

I think it actually flew at Aero India 2009.

Baron