UAV Acquisitions & Divestitures

Small/Tactical UAV Market Shake-up? The small/tactical segment of UAV is expanding, and players are consolidating, what are the implications?

Acquisition: Textron decided, in Early October 2007, to purchase AAI (United Industrial Corp.) for $1.1B.

AAI has strong revenues, a fine track record to point to with its Shadow program, contracts on the board as the FCS Class I (MAV) sub to Honeywell, an international presence in new subsidairy Aerosonde (US Navy/USMC Tier II competitor), and interesting RDT&E efforts (iSTAR platform, proposed/stalled FCS Class II).

Divestitures?: BAE systems sold it's Inertial Products business last year which was a UAV guidance and navigation payload provider... MTC technologies recently pulled out of the potential ~$1B Tier II competition for the USMC/US Navy, and had to return RDT&E funding to the USMC for the demonstrator they had operated (a net Q4 charge of $6.7M, in total).

Late Dec. 2007, we learn BAE is spending $450M to acquire MTC Technologies. It doesn't seem like the acquisition has anything to do with UAV... but that's still unclear. Are they both moving forward with or without UAV?

Upcoming Small/Tactical UAV Award: USN/USMC Tier II

Textron's prior record as an LSI in UAVs could be considered poor. The Eagle Eye VTOL platform was chosen as the next-generation Coast Guard UAV for the fiasco Deepwater program. The project never really got off the ground... well OK, it did fly, but also apparently crashed... now the Coast Guard assessing its options, and at least the DoD 2007 Unmanned Systems Roadmap still places Eagle Eye in service before 2014

After MTC technologies parted ways with the USMC, the Navy began testing the Raytheon/Swift Engineering Killerbee platform for weaponization, at China Lake.

How does AAI/Aerosonde/Textron stack up to Raytheon/Swift, Boeing/Insitu and other potential Tier II platforms?

Is BAE still pursuing it's Tier II bid?