Successful live-fire tests for Textron Systems Fury lightweight precision weapon.

The combined Textron Systems Weapon & Sensor Systems and Unmanned Systems team dropped Fury last month from a Shadow 200, engaging and detonating on the target. This marked the first live drop of the Fury and the first live weapon drop from the Unmanned Systems Shadow 200 aircraft configuration. The Textron Systems team, along with partner Thales UK, achieved this milestone within 15 months of initiating work on the small, lightweight weapon system.

“Our team is focused on quickly bringing new and affordable capability to the war fighter,” explains Weapon & Sensor Systems Senior Vice President and General Manager Ian Walsh. “Based on an understanding of our customers’ needs, we demonstrated – in a short period of time – Fury’s full TRL 7 capability in a realistic environment. Not only is the weapon simple to use, accurate and attractively priced, it’s an ideal complement to the trusted Shadow platform as well as other UAS or light attack aircraft. We’ve also proven that the lightweight weapon and carriage system creates very little drag, resulting in minimal operational impact to aircraft performance and endurance.”

Fury is equipped with a mature and proven warhead. The weapon’s tri-mode fuzing – impact, height of burst and delay – further enables a single Fury to address a broad target set, ranging from static and moving light armored vehicles to small boats and personnel.

The precision weapon uses a common interface for rapid integration on multiple manned and unmanned aircraft systems. Fury is guided by a GPS-aided inertial navigation unit system with a Semi-Active Laser Seeker terminal guidance capability. This enables the weapon to engage both stationary and moving targets within 1m accuracy, or fly to specific target coordinates.