The European Initiative to Design Civil Rotorcraft Unmanned Air Vehicles within the CAPECON Program

This paper discusses CAPECON, a new program within the civil European Aerospace Community to perform fundamental Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) studies originating from basic customer applications and finishing with preliminary designs. CAPECON is an engineering preliminary design effort covering both fixed and rotary wing UAVs. This paper discusses the scope, schedule, status and first results of the rotorcraft portion of CAPECON. First results are showing how key UAV applications can be grouped together into multi-role missions that then lead to custom designed UAV's. The program is in progress and on schedule and it is intended to produce marketable and certifiable UAV designs by mid 2004.