A military reconnaissance drone with a 26-meter wingspan has completed its first long-distance flight in Europe’s busy airspace. The 3-hour, 10-minute flight was designed to test how uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) and civilian aviation can coexist in a challenging environment.
The drone used in the experiment was the Israeli-made Heron TP, a turboprop UAV “customized” by Airbus to accommodate global certification requirements, according to an Airbus spokesperson.
The 470-kilometer flight, operated by German armed forces on 4 February, took off from the Jagel Air Base in Schleswig-Holstein, in northwestern Germany. The aircraft then flew at an altitude of 8.5 km to Leeuwarden in the Netherlands, where it performed a U-turn and returned to Schleswig. The maximum speed reached during the flight was 185 km/h (100 knots).
During the flight, the ground team handed over the monitoring of the Heron UAV from German military air traffic control to civilian air traffic control and then performed subsequent handovers to the cross-border civil air traffic control, into Dutch airspace, and back out of it. During the flight, the remotely piloted aircraft passed the Hamburg International Airport in Germany and also approached Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport, one of Europe’s busiest aviation hubs.
“European airspace is very congested,” says Stephen O’Sullivan, Project Officer for UAS Airspace Integration Research at the European Defense Agency (EDA), which funds the project. “If European militaries wanted to fly these systems around Europe, you would have to shut down parts of the airspace for commercial aviation. We are trying to demonstrate that these aircraft can operate safely amongst civil aviation without a need for special airspace corridors.”
How Military Drones and Civilian Aircraft Can Coexist at High Altitude
The flight, the first in a campaign of three missions, is a culmination of nearly a decade of work by EDA and its partners across Europe. In 2017, the agency tested the concept in a real-time simulation using the Air Traffic Control Research Simulator at the Netherlands Aerospace Centre in Amsterdam. The exercise had controllers guide the simulated remotely piloted aircraft through a real-life scenario with human air traffic controllers monitoring the flight and its interactions with other aircraft from a control tower simulator.
Four years later, the EDA funded the first test flight, using a smaller (MQ-9) Reaper, an attack drone made by the U.S. defense tech manufacturer General Atomics. In that experiment, the Reaper, owned by the French Air Force, took off from the Cognac Military Airbase in the west of France and flew south across the Pyrenees range into Spanish airspace, past Zaragoza and Barcelona, and then back to Cognac.
Although that 1,700-km flight covered almost double the distance of the recent test from Schleswig, it took place in the far less congested lower airspace, and reached a maximum altitude of 7 km, according to O’Sullivan.
“In upper airspace, aircraft typically travel faster, as this is where commercial jets operate,” O’Sullivan says. “Therefore, the slow speed of remotely piloted aircraft can lead to an increase in the burden on air traffic controllers, who need to ensure safe separation of aircraft.”
Most commercial flights take place above about 9 km (29,500 feet).
During the latest test flight, the Heron TP drone was remotely piloted by German Air Force controllers from the Jagel Air Base using a satellite relay and Global Navigational Satellite System positioning. The experiment also tested how to deal with disruptions of the communication links between the aircraft and the ground control, according to a spokesperson for the German Aerospace Center( DLR), which coordinated the experiment.
Heron Flight Also Tested Responses to Jamming and Spoofing
Such disruptions are an increasingly common occurrence because of jamming or spoofing. Jamming overwhelms signals with relatively high-powered radio-frequency noise and spoofing substitutes false coordinates, for example to throw off an attacking drone’s navigational systems and send it to a different destination. The DLR spokesperson declined to provide any details about the 4 February tests. Jamming and spoofing have become the typical countermeasures against drones in conflict zones, notably in Ukraine, where Ukrainian forces are using both techniques to defend against Russian kamikaze drones. A drone that loses its spatial bearings either crashes down or flies off in a random direction until it depletes its battery. Spoofing is more commonly used against long-range attack drones.
The Heron TP drone, manufactured by Israeli Aerospace Industries, is part of a fleet leased from Israel by Germany in 2018 in a deal worth $1.05 billion. The Herons can carry munitions, but the EDA plans to use them just for reconnaissance and surveillance, to monitor disaster zones or military deployments around European borders, O’Sullivan says.
The drone can reach a maximum altitude of 12.5 km and can remain in the air for up to 27 hours, enabling long-term observations to complement more intermittent satellite reconnaissance. “The Heron drone can carry out continuous surveillance of specific objects or areas of interest,” O’Sullivan notes. “It can maintain a holding pattern over a particular spot to allow persistent surveillance.”
The EDA flight tests, including the most recent one, are part of a wider effort to gain experience flying uncrewed aerial platforms in civilian airspace ahead of the completion of the Eurodrone project. This is a €7.6 billion joint development effort by Germany, France, Italy, and Spain to build an 11-tonne drone with a 30-meter wingspan that is expected to take to the sky for the first time in 2027. Built by a consortium including Airbus, France’s Dassault Aviation, and Italy’s Leonardo, the aircraft has been designed with full integration into civilian airspace in mind. According to the consortium, the Eurodrone will be able to stay in the air for up to 40 hours and carry a 2.3-tonne payload.
Photo: A Heron TP drone, customized by engineers at Airbus, took off from Jagel Air Base in Germany on 4 February 2025 – BUNDESWEHR/LARS PÖTZSCH
Source: IEEE Spectrum