Schiebel Camcopter S-300 SEACUREs the seas!
January 24, 2025
The new Camcopter S-300, an advanced unmanned aerial system (UAS) designed and developed by the Austrian Company Schiebel, has been selected as the core unmanned system and dedicated platform for the European SEACURE (Seabed and Anti-Submarine Warfare Capability through Unmanned Feature for Europe) project. This initiative involves a consortium of 35 companies from 13 European countries, and its focus on anti-submarine warfare (ASW) and seabed warfare (SBW) highlights the growing importance of protecting critical offshore and underwater infrastructure including energy installations, pipelines, and subsea cables.
The Schiebel Camcopter S-300 will play a pivotal role in the project, bringing a combination of long endurance (24 hours in a reconnaissance role, with cameras and Inverse Synthetic Aperture Radar (ISAR), or six hours carrying a 250-kg payload), and VTOL capability.
VTOL capability will allow the S-300 to operate from traditional runways or small launch pads, enabling rapid deployment from a variety of platforms, including land bases, ships, offshore platforms or even (surfaced) unmanned surface vessels (USVs).
Unmanned systems can perform continuous surveillance over vast maritime areas, using advanced sensors to detect submerged threats. This makes them a useful tool for securing vital assets and strategic maritime infrastructure.
The SEACURE project will address a range of difficult challenges in modern naval operations, focusing on the detection, classification, identification, and tracking of underwater threats in an evolving and highly demanding contested maritime environments. The use of autonomous unmanned aerial systems in a layered approach with surface, and underwater systems to provide a multi-faceted, flexible, efficient, and cost-effective protective system for key maritime zones and infrastructure.
Unmanned systems like the Camcopter S-300 will allow the real-time detection, classification, identification, tracking and monitoring of underwater threats, and, if needed, will be able to engage them, or to direct engagements. The use of autonomous unmanned systems will reduce the reliance on (scarce) manned platforms, freeing them for the highest priority tasks.
This promises to revolutionize how European Navies approach complex defence challenges.
The SEACURE project is set to culminate in a large-scale sea trial in or before 2028. This is expected to provide valuable data and useful insights into the effectiveness of unmanned systems in both anti-submarine and seabed warfare, and especially for protecting critical national and European assets and infrastructure from the growing threat posed by sabotage, grey-zone/sub-threshold warfare and direct military aggression in the maritime domain. SEACURE is also intended to establish a robust framework for the future integration of unmanned systems into European naval defence strategies.
The ongoing development of unmanned systems within the SEACURE framework will improve and enhance the protection of the maritime domain, increasing operational efficiency while reducing the risk to human operators. It is hoped that this will blaze a trail for a scalable solution for future naval warfare that is reliable and cost-effective.
