This aircraft design had a 6-g sustained and 9-g instantaneous load factor. The highly agile decoy UAV with high maneuverability capability was designed to launch from a pneumatic catapult and land via a parachute. The mission requirements for the high-speed decoy were a maximum altitude of 15,000 feet with maximum speed of 450 knots and an endurance of at least one hour. In this study, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) embedded in CAD software was used to optimize the aircraft design and test the aircraft performance during different operations such as cruise, maneuverability, and maximum speed.
A baseline high-speed decoy design CAD model The system picks up the signature of the drones and attacks them while the actual aircraft can be hidden with the swarm of drones. If operating as designed, one or more drones are launched from an actual aircraft as it enters airspace monitored by anti-aircraft systems. These drones are intended to confuse or mislead anti-aircraft defense systems. One area of increasing interest is the decoy drone, designed to mimic the radar and heat signature of an actual aircraft.
Drone aircraft and their uses have been evolving quickly, supported by a great deal of ongoing research.