PLUS by IAI - Advanced commercial solutionswww.iai.co.il • malat@iai.co.il

In recent years, commercial uses of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) have made significant progress and this trend is expected to make a quantum leap in coming years. As this new field reaches a turning point, the demand for commercial UAV services is expected to increase dramatically soon and, by the year 2030, it is expected to deliver annual sales of billions of dollars. This dramatic growth presents new opportunities to traditional UAS manufacturers. “As one of the pioneers and a dominant global player in the UAS field, Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) decided to focus on this evolving market. After analyzing the market needs and potential, we are launching new service offerings designed to serve specific market segments we consider as the most prepared to exploit the exciting new capabilities of UAVs.” Said Dor Dagan, Commercial Applications Business Development Manager at IAI Malat Division.

Applications and ServicesThrough 40 years of operations of unmanned systems, IAI has developed and deployed many platforms, accumulated well above a 1.5 million flight hours. “We now focus our commercial offerings on services for high capacity market that leverage UAVs with long endurance, specialized sensors, data processing automation and expert analysis, addressing specific utilization such as precision agriculture, forestry, oil and gas pipeline rights-of-way missions and emergency and disaster relief.” Dagan explained.Using the SUAV class drones such as our BirdEye 650D UAS that carry payloads such as EO/IR as well as hyper spectral sensors provides enormous value to users. For example, monitoring of crops, orchards and forests with hyper spectral sensors can provide farmers with essential information about the crops’ condition, health and yield, irrigation efficiency, and more.Although IAI is a UAV manufacturer, its commercial UAS are offered as services that go beyond the common imagery and maps delivered by the sensors, but rather the actionable information such as soil condition, irrigation efficiency or diseases, and relevant decision support alerts. This information is based on remote sensing processed with expert analysis and automated decision support tools that provide the customers with customized insights and alerts to help prevent losses, increase yields and take corrective actions before damages happen. For example, our sensors can indicate farmers on soils that need irrigation in specific areas, thus minimizing the expenses on fertilizers and the same is for Pesticides.Harnessing these capabilities for pipeline monitoring, users benefit from those flying patrols that extend surveillance over hundreds, even thousands of miles of over ground and even underground pipeline, locating damage, leaks, environmental hazards, fires, and other suspicious activities and theft attempts.

Firefighting, search and rescue, and emergency response is another area where IAI UAVs contribute to more efficient crisis management, offering reliable and comprehensive situational assessment using persistent, remotely operated aerial assets that provide the details, situational awareness and location precision provided for effective response. Platform size matters in these applications as well, enabling operators to deploy different payloads – such as live video, thermal imaging, wide area surveillance, communications relays and emergency cellular services.These applications are already supported by manned and unmanned aerial platforms for many years, including light aircrafts, specialized agricultural drones and quadcopters, but the introduction of small UAVs to this market increases returns on investment for operators, expanding the endurance, range, mission capabilities and scale.

PLUS by IAI Commercial users get new insights from UAS

Partners and Customers“These capabilities are offered to our customers by service providers that partner with IAI.” Dagan explains. “Such partners are operators that already offer aerial services, manned or unmanned, that leverage the advantages offered by IAI’s unique capabilities to increase the efficiency of services and add more customers.” Deploying IAI’s efficient, long endurance platforms and unique services, operators can deliver more missions per unit and serve more customers, thus increasing the Return on Investment (ROI). IAI facilitates this by bringing its technology and knowhow to the partnership - providing the UAVs, sensors, processing application and information systems that provide customers with specific insights and actionable information. Such systems can operate day and night, under almost all weather conditions and pollution that inhibits all that, at mission costs well below the costs of manned aircraft.

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