30 10-15 kg can be mounted there without affecting flight stability. To power payloads (as well as avionics), one alternator is installed on the engine shaft, while another runs on the main gearbox’s output shaft, such that even in autorotation at least one alternator will continue generating electrical power. Two batteries are installed onboard with 85 Wh each for a balanced DC bus output, but for weight efficiency, the S-100 is not yet fully electric or loaded with heavy battery packs, and autorotation can significantly outlast battery capacity; hence the alternator strategy. A single flight control box above the fuel tank and behind the main gearbox contains the redundant avionics for flight management, the payload management system, power-supply boards, redundant GNSS-INS and redundant data links. For traffic awareness at altitude, transponders configured for Mode IFF, Mode S, AIS and third-party TCAS data links tend to be installed as well. “As a small, multi-purpose aircraft, you can’t really go 10 cm anywhere along the fuselage without finding an antenna,” Hecht comments. “There’s one GNSS antenna in the middle of the tail fuselage section, and another atop the tail rotor fin, with trees of data-link antennas about the fuselage because there will always be one shaded, based on the direction the UAV is facing.” Mission systems While the S-100 was principally built to carry big camera gimbals and perform ISR roles, Schiebel focuses on making the S-100 payload agnostic, and it has therefore integrated many sensors to many different ends without dictating to customers which mission systems should be installed (data processing and analytics in particular are customer-specific and left to the end-user to choose or tailor). “We favour a few that we know are good; for instance, we’ve worked closely with L3 WESCAM in Canada over the years, and lots of our customers fly their 10 in MX-10 in the main undercarriage bay, but we’ve also integrated EO/IRs from, say, Trakka and Teledyne FLIR,” Hunter says. “With 10 kg of payload capacity in the nose, around nine out of 10 customers ask for a front-pointing Sony camera for the operator to use and step in if manual avoidance ever becomes necessary, but EO/IRs can also go in the nose. The UK Royal Navy S-100s, for instance, have an L3 WESCAM MX-8 gimbal there. “We’ve also nose-mounted Overwatch Imaging’s PT- and TK-series sensors. The latter notably scans to surrounding horizons like a radar, but by using three different cameras of three different wavelengths and resolutions – they can do maritime surveillance, terrain analysing [and] wildfire analysing sensors – it’s quite a spread of capabilities they do.” At least two radars have been flown, including Leonardo’s PicoSAR and Thales’ I-Master (the former being side-mounted and used by an Asian customer for maritime domain awareness, while the latter typically sits in the undercarriage of the UK Royal Navy’s S-100s). Both are SARs, and crucial for ground-moving target indication (GMTI), maritime moving target indication (MMTI) and target tracking through clouds during obscure weather conditions. Hunter adds that IMSAR’s SARs will soon be integrated for a couple of emerging contracts. “On the entertainment side, we worked with the FLIR Systems Polytech Corona 350 II gimbal for a Hollywood customer 10 years ago, who wanted some very hi-res, high action cinematography. That was something of a one-off, but we still occasionally get asked about doing that sort of thing,” Hunter recalls. Arguably, the fastest-growing market for the S-100 is anti-submarine warfare (ASW), driving r&d into how objects below the water surface can be detected and tracked from the air. To that end, the S-100 can be equipped with two 10 kg arrays of sonobuoys (totalling four) either side. RIEGL’s bathymetric Lidars have also been integrated and tested in shallow waters to great effect, potentially more for MCM than ASW. Schiebel is also working with Thales France to integrate the latter’s ASW August/September 2024 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Schiebel’s S2 engine is a 60 hp Wankel rotary engine, which runs on JP-5, JP-8 and Jet A-1
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