Lockheed Martin is flight-testing a new version of the Fury UAV, although the company declines to release crucial details.

"It improves certain areas that our specific customers wanted to have in terms of capability," says Jay McConville, Lockheed's director of business development for unmanned integrated systems. "What we did was we took the base model of Fury and tweaked a few things to make it more operationally relevant."

Lockheed Martin Fury UAV

 Lockheed Martin  

Improvements include noise signature reductions and a sleeker aerodynamic profile.

The improvement programme began with Lockheed's November 2012 purchase of Chandler/May, builders of what was at the time called the Fury 1500 and Lockheed-branded Desert Hawk. Although internally funded, "what we looked at was where we were, and how we could more precisely meet customer missions, and we made those changes," says McConville. "There are several customers involved, we looked across the waterfront and looked at how to get there."

Source: Flight Daily News