Air Wolf just prior to Burns Flat dawn launch
Kratos Defense & Security Solutions, Inc. announced that its Air Wolf Tactical Drone System completed a 100 percent successful flight at the recently approved Burns Flat, Oklahoma Range Facility.
The Kratos Air Wolf Mission, which was the inaugural flight at the Burns Flat Range location, included multiple new payloads carried by the Air Wolf Drone, including a proprietary Kratos artificial intelligence/autonomy system, which has been developed by Kratos specifically for high performance, jet drone aircraft.
Air Wolf is one of several drones in Kratos’ family of affordable, high-performance jet drones that are flying today, also including the attritable UTAP-22 Mako, XQ-58A Valkyrie, and the reusable X-61A Gremlins drone with the Gremlins Program Prime being with Kratos’ strategic partner Dynetics. The newly approved Burns Flat Test Range and Facility is an important new strategic asset available to Kratos, enabling Kratos to accelerate its drone testing and demonstration, further increasing Kratos’ ability to rapidly develop and demonstrate jet drones, supporting subsystems, and other tactical systems and aircraft. For competitive, security and other considerations, no additional information will be provided regarding the successful Air Wolf flight and mission.
Steve Fendley, President of Kratos Unmanned Systems Division, said,
“This successful Air Wolf flight at the recently approved Burns Flat Range facility is the latest example of the teaming approach Kratos routinely takes with its partners at the local, state and federal government levels with the objective of accelerating technology development and a focus on science, technology, engineering, and math advancement. The Air Wolf drone system that successfully flew today demonstrated a number of new mission systems which we believe are operationally and tactically relevant for Kratos’ government customer set, as our proven commercial development approach and robust digital engineering, modeling and simulation capabilities, and affordability-focused processes continue to successfully rapidly deliver affordable high performance jet aircraft, not just models, surrogates, or renditions.”
“Kratos thanks Senator Inhofe, the Federal Aviation Administration and all other government stakeholders in bringing the Burns Flat Range and Test facility to a reality, and we believe that Burns Flat will be an incredibly valuable asset to the State of Oklahoma and for companies like Kratos. Kratos’ Ghost Works played an incredibly important role in today’s successful Air Wolf flight, and with our Valkyrie, Mako, Gremlin and Air Wolf drones, we believe that we are ready now, today, to meet our customers’ requirements with a family of affordable, high performance jet drones in the disposable, reusable and attritable classes.”