Dubai Airshow 2025 – EDGE Advanced Concepts unveils the Hunter loitering munitions and the Nasef cruise missile families, while aiming at further reducing development time
Among the many new systems presented by EDGE at the Dubai exhibition, some where still in the hands of Advanced Concepts, the group entity of that looks forward, to products to come, developing technologies and working on new concept systems, two families being unveiled, one known as Hunter, related to loitering munitions, the second being the Nasef, cruise missiles capable to increase the lethal range of UAVs not only against ground but also against air targets. All this while this EDGE entity also looks at further reducing development time
Typically, Advanced Concepts new concept systems are first validated then they are developed up to high developmental TRL, before passing them to the group production entities. At the Dubai Airshow EDR On-Line could speak with Dr. Abdelhadi Besri, one of Advanced Concepts programme managers. “At Advanced Concepts, and within the whole EDGE group, we are looking for new technologies covering, air, sea and land, not only for hardware but for software part, and we are part of the move towards digitalisation, so we are covering a diverse portfolio with advanced concepts.”
Looking at the three classical domains air is still the dominant one. “We have a large ammunition portfolio, ranging from very small drones, 2.5 kg, to, let’s say to systems one or two orders of magnitude greater. These have different ranges, different missions, and they are adaptable for different platforms, can be launched from land, sea, or air, and can counter different kinds of threats.
Among the flying systems currently under development at Advanced Concepts we find the Hunter family, a series of loitering munitions that ranges from a soldier-portable system, the Hunter-SP that can be carried by a soldier, to other with increasing dimensions and payload, and of course different missions, the Hunter 2-S, the Hunter N, and the Hunter 5/10,” Dr. Besri told EDR On-Line.
“We would like to become more vertical, owning the technology at different layers, at different steps. Talking about industrialisation, here verticalisation means design cycle ownership, IP ownership. In many areas we started using off-the-shelf to get a foot in that domain, but we are now designing our own subsystems. Another key element in design, especially for loitering munitions, looking at mass production, is to start considering the manufacturing issue since inception, it must be a priority since the white sheet. Design for manufacturing is now part of our process. We at Advanced Concepts would like to get to a point where we can release relatively mature or mature drones, TRL6 or 7, to our sister companies for the production, something that was not the case in the past, the shift between us and production entities was happening at a lower TRL.” Not only, Advanced Concepts will start considering certification issues since the launch of the development programme, in order to minimise possible hurdles when the product will have to go through the verification of all the standards required, shortening certification time and therefore contributing to a reduced time to market.
Subsonic cruise missiles are another category that the EDGE think tank is working on, the Sabre and the three members of the Nasef cruise missile family. “The real novelty we have in this show is the Nasef 10 air-to-air,” Dr. Besri told EDR On-Line, adding that Advanced Concepts always tries to capture as much as it can the requirements, exploiting its systems modularity to answer them. “In this case we started from the Nasef 10 air-to-ground missile already in the development phase, together with the bigger Nasef 20, reusing many of the Nasef 10 building blocks, with which the Nasef 10 AAM maintains a roughly 70% commonality.
EDR On-Line understood that the Nasef family of products will be qualified by Advanced Concepts before being handed over to an EDGE manufacturing company. This starts from subsystems, and Advanced Concepts is very much concentrating on those items, not only physical ones such as
day and night cameras, antennas, trackers, but also the invisible part, which is the logic behind. “We consider all the software, all the algorithms, and I am convinced this are among the disruptive elements,” Abdelhadi Besri says, the word “disruptive” being pronounced quite often in the EDGE ecosystem.
This was used in the past by the top management not only related to the technical side but also to the cost; “I will not talk about money, but what I can say is that verticalisation, which I mentioned earlier, which allows us to check, item by item, our bill of material, not only allows reducing time to market but also allows us to be competitive in terms of cost part. This is one of the reasons why we want to own the technology and build on it. So, we try to make it as vertical as possible and in-house as possible.” This does not mean that EDGE in general does not outsource part of the subsystems production. “We check where the value is, and if it makes sense to outsource, we are very pragmatic, we do it. If we identify a strategic interest, in terms of intellectual property, of agility, of independence towards supply chain restrictions, we will think about it and may decide to bring it in-house as well,” the programme manager explained.
Photos by P. Valpolini
