US Navy awards Insitu multi-year contract for RQ-21A Blackjack production.

The US Navy announced a contract award to Boeing Insitu worth up to $390 million for the RQ-21A Blackjack unmanned air vehicle.

RQ-21A Blackjack (Picture source: Institu / Boeing)

In partnership with the Department of the Navy, Insitu developed the RQ-21A Blackjack program to fill the requirement for a small tactical unmanned aircraft system capable of operating from land and sea. The system is modular, versatile and multi-mission capable, providing rapid transitions between land and maritime environments. Blackjack’s open payload architecture is customized with imagers, communication and signals intelligence capabilities and other tools to give the warfighter a look ahead in all operational environments.

The award is for as many as 63 RQ-21A Navy and Marine Corps “attrition air vehicles,” in addition to system and vehicle sales to Canada, Poland and Oman.

This contract provides for up to six RQ-21A unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and up to 17 RQ-21A air vehicles for foreign military sales (FMS) customers, including the governments of Canada, Poland and Oman. The contractor will also provide up to 93 ScanEagle UASs in various configurations.

In addition, this contract provides for associated services, including training, test and engineering, development of engineering change proposals, operations support, organizational level maintenance, field service representatives, land and ship surveys, hardware site activations, hardware installs, repairs and data,” it continues.

Work is expected to be completed in June 2022.