The US Army intends to award North Eastern Aeronautical Company (NEANY) Inc. a USD49.2 million sole-source contract to modernise and merge the capabilities of the company”s Arrow unmanned aircraft system (UAS) with the service”s lighter-than-air (LTA) Persistent Surveillance System (PSS).
The Justification and Approval (J&A) for the contract, which was posted on the Federal Business Opportunities (FedBizOpps) website on 17 October, describes the Arrow and PSS Enhancement, Experimentation and Evaluation (APSSE3) effort as being for the purpose of improving tactical situational awareness, intelligence gathering, targeting and tracking, and pre- and post-blast and disaster management.
According to the notification posted on FedBizOpps, the technical focus areas of this effort include improving and consolidating technologies for communication, ground processing, exploitation, sensors, interface controls, and others that could increase the effectiveness of the Arrow UAS and LTA PSS, and their sensor payload systems. It will provide classified and unclassified research and development (R&D) to improve processes for flight operations, logistics for rapid deployments, and cross platform training also.