THE AERIAL PREDATORS: Drones of the Indian Military
The military advancements of aerial technology has led to the race among nations, which has reached to such a point where manual involvement has less future and mechanics will play a crucial role on the battlefield. Talking about the Indian military organizations, automated weapons and security systems have reduced human efforts and loss of lives to a great extent. With the introduction of UAVs (pilotless aircraft), the change in armed forces shifted their focus on guided missiles. Cross-nation airstrikes, military attacks on the enemy airbases, and various other military operations are now being guided by UAVs as an observer, attacker and planning too.
Various UAVs and Automated unmanned research vehicles are being currently used by the Indian military, some of them are listed here:
UAV NISHANT
NISHANT, which means ‘end of darkness’ is a tactical UAV and can be employed in tactical areas in a local domain. The limited series production has been specially prepared for Indian Army as per their requirements, by the Aeronautical Development Establishment of the Defense Research and Development Organization, DRDO.
The tactical highlights of NISHANT include multi-mission day & night vision capabilities using advance payloads, jam-resistant command link and digital downlink. UAV Nishant is a highly mobile, compact and easily deployable device system and can undertake any of the day or night battlefield exploration, investigation, target tracking and localization. It can also help in correction of artillery fire. With an endurance capacity of 4 hours and 30 minutes, it can attain a maximum speed of 185 km per hour.
UAV HERON
Heron is a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) UAV, which is used by the Indian Air Force. Developed by Israel, the Indian military uses the armed version of this drone, capable of artillery adjustment operations. It has a flight time of 52 hours, but its actual time of flight depends on weight it carries and flight profile. It has some advanced features like surveillance and intelligence tasks. The Heron was designed as a multi-mission platform to address local and international customers’ needs and to perform a variety of strategic missions, including intelligence gathering, surveillance, target attainment and scouting, using various payloads, with a high level of reliability.
UAV RUSTOM
Rustom is an unnamed combat air vehicle, a production of DRDO dedicated to all three services of Indian armed forces. Some top private players in the defence field are bidding for its manufacturing deal. This UAV comes with wheels which makes its take-off and landing a bit ahead of Nishant. It is made to carry out intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance operation for Armed Force with a capability to operate in all kinds of climatic conditions. The UAV weighed 2 tonnes and testing was operated and piloted by the Armed Forces doing its test flight.
UAV AURA
Another super-efficient DRDO production, UAV AURA is aimed to service the Indian Air Force and is still under manufacturing. It will be able to have certain advanced supremacies over the other UAVs, like bomb dropping, missile releasing and other attacking tasks. Its external design resembles with B-2 bomber. India’s DRDO and Israeli firms are under contracts for its manufacturing.
Being an armed UAV, it gets its ‘combat’ designation. The AURA is expected to carry a pair of laser-guided bombs or similar, depending upon the scope and requirement of the mission. The DRDO AURA program is in its stages of design with certain aspects of the program still being addressed. The introduction into service is planned for 2020.
