It's official:  Boeing's Insitu subsidiary has outstripped Boeing Commercial Airplanes in delivery rates for air vehicles. The production rate of the Scan Eagle UAV, which was 35 vehicles a month at the beginning of the year, has reached 54 a month to meet operational needs worldwide.

Considering that Insitu delivered its 1000th vehicle only a couple of months ago, the program is clearly growing at a rapid rate. Insitu founder and CEO Steve Sliwa also disclosed today at the Association for Unmanned Vehicles Systems International (AUVSI) show in Washington that the larger Integrator vehicle (about three times the size of the 40-pound ScanEagle) is already in low-rate initial production and will start deliveries to an undisclosed US government customer early in 2010. 

Insitu is pursuing a two-track approach for Integrator. As well as being Boeing's candidate for the Small Tactical UAS (STUAS) program, Insitu will continue to offer it as a commercial off the shelf (COTS) system, provided to customers in the same way that Insitu provides ScanEagle support to the USMC - on a contract basis, with the company being paid according to flying hours provided to the tactical end user. "There's no such thing as a product business", Sliwa says.

Using that approach, Insitu will be able to field Integrator with military users before the STUAS program, which starts with a two-year development phase. At the same time, Insitu can mature the Integrator's new avionics - including a flight control system from Rockwell Collins' Athena and a plug-and-play sensor bay - and flow those technologies back into ScanEagle, as well as developing and fielding a common launch and ground system. 

Insitu's engineers, Sliwa says, are "salivating" over the processors being developed for the Apple iPhone. "With two more Moore's law steps it will help us by a huge amount on this class of UAS." Potential developments: more direct UAV-to-user link, and the ability to "daisy chain" UAS to achieve non-line-of-sight communications without satcoms.