24 There is an adage among uncrewed aircraft engineers: “If your UAV doesn’t break in the first 100 flight hours, you’ve built it too heavy.” Though outwardly humorous, it carries an underlying affirmation that the most critical ingredient in maturing and optimising a UAV is time. To fine-tune an aerostructure for the perfect strength-toweight ratio, or an engine for its highest fuel efficiency and lowest vibration, takes copious trial and error over years of flight testing, analysis, simulation and repetition. If a platform has not been flown to the point of error, such that its faults can be pinpointed and worked out of the system, one could argue that it needs more time before flying real-world missions, let alone being certifiable. Schiebel has leveraged many different resources during the 30-plus years since development of the Camcopter began, including people, parts and extensive in-house machinery, but time has brought out the best in all of them. Through decades of r&d and iteration, the Austrian company has unearthed and cut out its flagship product’s flaws to the point that it has become one of the most trusted and commonly sighted rotorcraft on navy vessels’ main decks the world over. When we first spoke to Schiebel in late spring 2024, it had just completed factory acceptance tests of what it estimated to be its 523rd unit of the S-100 Camcopter. As of writing, the 200 kg uncrewed helicopter has flown with 40 customers globally, providing predominantly large naval and other military organisations with a wide range of autonomous sensing capabilities through its open, integrationfocused architecture. Users can benefit from its 50 kg payload capacity, an operating endurance typically exceeding six hours (varying with flight and weather patterns, although an external fuel tank can be added for about four additional Rory Jackson looks back over three decades of optimising a trusted flagship product Copter classic August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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