Germany's Euro Hawk unmanned air vehicle is due to make its first test flight in the nation's airspace late this year, with industry partners Northrop Grumman and Cassidian working through a longer-than-expected process to secure preliminary airworthiness certification approvals.
The certification process is "probably the biggest challenge in the programme" to field the Northrop RQ-4 Global Hawk derivative, says Jim Kohn, the company's Euro Hawk programme director. "In the US it was a system-level certification, but for Germany it's all the way down to the box level. It's a painfully detailed approach."
A development example of the unmanned surveillance asset was flown to Manching, near Munich from the USA in July 2011, and was rolled out at the test site in October 2011. Work to install its Cassidian integrated signals intelligence system payload was completed in February this year, with another recent milestone being a first taxi trial performed in June.
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