The Herti air vehicle, which will switch to a Rotax piston-engine in production variants, has a wing span of 12.6 m and a fuselage length of 5.1 m. It is capable of flying in excess of 20,000 ft and has an endurance/range of more than 25 hours and 1,000 km. The second-generation ICE II payload features two wide field of view electro-optical (EO) cameras and one turret-mounted EO camera for narrow field of view imagery collection. All have infra-red and low-light capability.
A lightweight synthetic-aperture radar is also under operational assessment. BAE's breakthrough, according to Wilson, is the system's reliance initially on low-resolution data for general surveillance and an advanced target/object recognition system, which alerts the operator when it has found an object or target of interest. This overcomes a problem inherent in very complex, highly engineered systems like Global Hawk, which is tied to high-resolution imagery collection throughout the mission, thereby absorbing huge amounts of bandwidth.
During trials of the ICE system over the Irish Sea in August 2005, Herti1-A's wide field of view sensors were able to pick out a 255 mm lobster pot, identified by the operator before the mission as the target of interest, from a wide swath of background wave clutter. The system then autonomously tasked the turret-mounted narrow field of view sensor to confirm the image. Such technology, Wilson believes, will be of immense interest to customers with maritime and border patrol and disaster relief requirements. In the production model, the operator will be able to pre-plan safety corridors for the air vehicle that will programme the flight-control system automatically to avoid 'conflicts'. These might be sensitive civilian sites, such as schools, oil refineries or power stations, or military sites, such as surface-to-air missile systems. The advanced safety features, drawn up in conjunction with regulatory bodies like the UK Civil Aviation Authority, are intended to lead to air vehicles operating in controlled airspace as soon as the legislation allows.
Other missions include tactical support for infantry units and bomb damage assessment. The ground-station is built up around four standard PCs and can be packaged within a single, specially adapted Land Rover. Each ground-station will be capable of controlling up to four air vehicles. The wings of the air vehicle are removable and can be loaded alongside the fuselage into a trailer and towed behind the Land Rover. The vehicle needs a paved or grass runway to launch and recover.