Daher flies its MALE EyePulse drone

Daher has successfully completed flight demonstrations of EyePulse, a Medium Altitude Long Endurance (MALE) drone prototype presented to the French Defense Procurement Agency as part of a call for projects. This successful maiden flight, carried out at the Tarbes site, is a key milestone that confirms the Daher Group's ability to act quickly and respond to the needs of defense stakeholders. By producing a MALE drone prototype demonstrator in less than six months, in partnership with Thales, Daher has fulfilled its commitments and demonstrated its ability to meet the DGA's objective of rapidly strengthening the drone capabilities of the French armed forces and for export.

Nicolas Chabbert, CEO of the Aircraft Division at the Daher Group commented: "As a partner to the armed forces for over thirty years, Daher draws on its innovative capabilities and dual industrial expertise to contribute fully to the transformation of French defense capabilities. We are mobilizing our skills and resources to prepare for mass production of drones. This EyePulse flight demonstration confirms the relevance of our approach and our ability to ramp up production."

Alexandre Lahousse, Deputy Director General of the DGA stated: "The speed with which Daher was able to implement this demonstration illustrates the company's agility. Its ability to use certified and mastered technological building blocks for new applications greatly facilitates their integration in the defense sector. Furthermore, Daher's sovereign aspect, through its industrialization and production capacity within France, is a major asset. Finally, its ability to collaborate effectively with other players to integrate technologies not mastered in-house is also worthy of praise."

The demonstration consisted of an automated flight sequence including an autonomous landing phase. Daher, the project architect and leader, integrated Thales' ScaleFlyt avionics system into an existing platform and enabled a fully autonomous flight phase after activation from the ground by Alexandre Lahousse, Deputy Director General of the DGA and accompanied by a DGA delegation.

Thales, a technology partner, developed the remote control system, providing the ground station and the ground-to-air command and control data link. This integration is based on a technology-agnostic control principle that is interoperable with different systems and complements the advanced technology of Daher's EyePulse platform, which is capable of automatic and autonomous flight. This collaborative sovereign project has highlighted the complementary expertise of the two companies.