2nd of 14 Global6500 HADES US Army to order before Dec 31 A key Army official is confident the service’s manned ISR HADES platform will award contracts for sensor integration before the end of the year, with the plane expected to be operational 12-18 months after.
Speaking to Breaking Defense during last week’s Farnborough Airshow, Andrew Evans, director of the Army ISR Task Force, said that the decision about which company will be putting their sensors onto the Bombardier Global 6500 airframe already selected by the service will come by “the end of the calendar year, certainly. We will look to accelerate that, and we think that partnership will be very powerful for us moving forward.”
Evans declined to say which companies or capabilities are in the running at this point, but did say the initial packages include “a Moving Target Indication capability, we’ll have high-end signal intelligence capability, and we’ll have a number of other capabilities that come with HADES as a baseline configuration.”
Evans also threw praise towards Bombardier, noting that the Army is on track to acquire its second Global 6500 airframe before the end of the year. The decision to go with the Global 6500 was made, Evans said, in part because the plane has room to grow in the future as the sensors for HADES evolve and grow.
“We are fully confident in where the OEM [original equipment manufacturer], in this case, Bombardier defense, is going with the jet. We’re happy about the design. We think we’ve got a good plan [going] forward there,” he said. “What I like to tell people is, the way that HADES will be configured today will likely not be the way it’s configured in five years, 10 years or 15 years.”https://breakingdefense.com/2024/07/hades-heating-up-integration-contracts-for-armys-new-spy-plane-by-years-end/