With armed forces taking unmanned aircraft more seriously, is the aerospace industrial base ready to meet the emerging requirements? The answer is yes, and no.

While most operational systems evolved from technology demonstrators, much of the innovative work on unmanned aircraft is being fostered by service laboratories working with small businesses. That leaves traditional aircraft manufacturers scrambling to catch up.

Asked at the media roundtable in April what he saw as the future of the U.S. tactical aircraft industrial base, Defense Secretary Robert Gates said simply “JSF and Reaper.” That he should see Lockheed Martin’s manned F-35 Joint Strike Fighter and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems’ unmanned Predator family as the only tactical platforms with a future is serving as a wake-up call for the industry.

“Look at a lot of successful UAVs—they came out of nowhere, not out of the major airframe primes,” says David Vos, senior director of control technologies at Rockwell Collins. “Not out of Northrop Grumman, but through its acquisition of Ryan [Aeronautical]. And not out of Boeing, but from Insitu and Frontier.”

Vos’s company Athena Technologies, a pioneer in lightweight, low-cost, high-reliability flight-control systems for UAVs, was itself acquired by Rockwell Collins in 2004, making the company a leading supplier of avionics for manned and unmanned aircraft. It is a pattern being repeated elsewhere, as in Boeing’s acquisition of successful small UAS maker Insitu to add to its earlier takeover of unmanned helicopter developer Frontier.

Insitu was a small Washington-state company that originally designed the ScanEagle for tuna hunting from fishing boats, and used local surfboard makers as its supply base. Now it is at the core of a Boeing effort to build an unmanned aircraft business that includes the A160T (now YMQ-18A) autonomous helicopter and Phantom Ray unmanned combat aircraft demonstrator.

The burgeoning small UAS market has also attracted Northrop Grumman, which has acquired the blended wing/body UAV product line developed by small rapid-prototyping company Swift Engineering and licensed one of the designs to Raytheon. BAE Systems has acquired small UAV maker Advanced Ceramics Research with an eye on the U.S. market.

But whether the traditional primes can maintain the rapid innovation and low cost for which the unmanned market is known remains to be seen, particularly as the Pentagon’s procurement regime gets a belated grip on the sector. John Langford, president of UAV developer Aurora Flight Sciences, believes the Navy/Marine Corps Small Tactical UAS/Tier 2 competition now underway, which seeks both early deployment and rigorous trials, could prove a test case for Defense Dept. efforts to normalize UAS procurement.

As traditional primes look to penetrate the unmanned systems market, their experience with manned platforms might not turn out to be quite the advantage it seems. “Rockwell Collins’s success in UAVs is entirely down to approaching the avionics with a clean sheet, and not shoehorning manned-aircraft systems into unmanned aircraft,” says Vos.

Because the unmanned market is emergent, not established, the industrial base is still evolving from its back-shop origins. “Today we are probably on the third generation of UASs, and it’s the first generation to have broken out to the mainstream,” says Langford. He notes that the system sports DNA that stems back to model aircraft that got fancy and to manned aircraft with their cockpits yanked out.