Leonardo from Italy displays its Falco EVO drone at MSPO 2022.

Italian Company Leonardo displays its state-of-the-art Unmanned Aerial System solution Falco EVO at MSPO 2022, International Defense Industry Fair and Exhibition that takes place in Poland.

Italian company Leonardo displays its Falco EVO drone at MSPO 2022, defense exhibition in Poland. (Picture source Army Recognition)

Leonardo’s Falco family of remotely-piloted aircraft systems currently includes the mature and proven Falco Evo for heavy tactical surveillance missions and the new Falco Xplorer, a larger system designed to deliver persistent, multi-sensor strategic surveillance. The company has extensive experience operating Falco family aircraft in a range of environments, including the harsh equatorial African climate, where Leonardo has delivered over 10,000 hours of uncrewed surveillance flights. A recent highlight saw the Falco family supporting missions in the Mediterranean as part of the European Frontex agency's maritime surveillance project in 2018 and, today, the uncrewed aircraft are flying to support border surveillance for another Italian initiative. Currently, more than 60 Falco family aircraft are operated worldwide.

The Falco Evo is designed for ISR (Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance) tactical roles and has a number of characteristics that make it an ideal tool for such missions: monitoring wide areas of land and sea and enabling timely targeted interventions. These include its ability to fly in all weather conditions, any time, day and night, its more than 16 hours of flight endurance, its 100kg of sensors capacity and its communications capabilities, which allow the aircraft to transmit quality images and real-time data.

The Falco EVO UAV has a length of 6.2 m, a wing span of 12.5 m, and a height of 2.5 m. The maximum take-off weight (MTOW) of the UAV is 650 kg and the maximum payload capacity is more than 100 kg.

The Falco EVO UAV is able to carry a wide selection of mission payloads including Electro-Optical (EO)/Infra-red (IR)/ Laser Range Finder (LRF)/Laser Designator (LD), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), passive and active Electronic Warfare (EW) equipment with the ability to carry combined payload suites function of the mission task, including SATCOM operations.