Israeli unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) specialist Aeronautics is currently pushing further into the naval market and developing its offering in loitering munitions, company president and CEO Dan Slasky has outlined.
Speaking to ESD at the IDEX 2025 defence exhibition in Abu Dhabi on 17 February, Slasky said, “We’re heavily going into the naval area; the need for naval UAVs is growing significantly. We have many different solutions for those areas, so that’s a vector.
“Another one is loitering munitions,” he added, but UAV loitering munitions, which is different than your typical canister-launched loitering munition because these are both UAVs, so you have that capability to loiter a long time.”
Slasky gave as an example a concept where two of the company’s Orbiter 2 mini-UAVs would be used: one with the usual intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance payload and the other carrying a warhead.
“So you have one motoring out there and finding the target and the other one is in standby, and then you can actually hit the target in real time when it’s found,” he explained. “This gives a lot of flexibility because of the relatively long endurance time in the air. So that’s another vector that we’re investing in.”
Aeronautics’ combat-proven Orbiter 1K, based on the Orbiter 2, is also specifically designed as a loitering munition and features a fragmentation warhead weighing more than 3 kg.
Meanwhile, Aeronautics is in full-scale production with its Orbiter 5 UAV, which was launched at the Paris Air Show in 2023 and now has “numerous customers, both locally and internationally”, Slasky noted.
Although it only has a maximum take-off weight of 75 kg, the Orbiter 5 combines an effective payload weight of 25 kg with an endurance of up to 25 hours and was designed to be capable of performing around 80% of the missions of a much larger medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) UAV, Slasky noted. The Orbiter 5’s smaller footprint and consequent lower signature, however, make it much more survivable over the modern battlefield, Slasky added.
Aeronautics’ stand at IDEX 2025, as well as showing an Orbiter 2 loitering munition variant, also featured one of the company’s Orbiter 4 tactical UAVs fitted with an add-on vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) kit. This concept was launched by Aeronautics in 2022 and gives the user a greater degree of operational flexibility at the price of a slightly shorter time in the air than the Orbiter 4’s usual endurance of up to 24 hours when launched by catapult.
