Lockheed Martin Fields Ground Control Station for Fury UAS

Defense contractor Lockheed Martin has fielded its Expeditionary Ground Control Station (xCGS) to support the new Fury UAS.

According to C4ISRnet.com, Lockheed developed and manufactured the first xCGS unit in Huntsville, Ala. before delivery and integration with the Fury in San Luis Obispo, Calif. in early 2014. Initial flight testing has been completed in preparation for future deployments.

The xCGS provides processing and communications support electronics for Fury UAS ground control operations, a Lockheed news release states, in addition to “all supported payload tasking, processing, exploitation and dissemination.”

“The Fury UAS is an expeditionary platform with best-in-industry capabilities,” said Jay McConville, director of business development for Lockheed Martin’s Fury UAS. “It is an Advanced Group 3 UAS with significant increases to endurance, payload capacity, communications capability, and advanced mission management. Often times our warfighters are struggling with the ‘tyranny of distance.’ Fury gives them a toolset to tackle these challenges. For these reasons we needed a ground control hardware implementation that was rugged, light-weight, and incredibly powerful. The xGCS has met all of our requirements and expectations.”

The xCGS supports multiple UAS platforms in addition to the Fury.