Bombardier awarded Army prototyping contract for HADES spy plane

UPDATED 1/4/2024 at 9:32am to include contract award figures provided by the Army.

PARIS — The US Army announced today it has awarded Bombardier Defense with a contract for what will be among the service’s first business jets-turned-spy aircraft prototypes.

The contract, awarded Dec. 12, is for one Global 6500 jet with options to buy two others to be used for the Army’s HADES, or High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System, project designed to replace the RC-12 Guardrail.

“HADES will bring the Army increased range, speed, endurance and aerial [intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] ISR depth,” Col. Joe Minor, project manager for the service’s fixed-wing aircraft, said in a statement. “HADES will operate at higher altitudes than legacy turboprop platforms. Higher altitudes equate to an ability to sense farther and more persistently into areas of interest. Deep sensing is the Army’s number-one operational imperative for the Army of 2030.”

The Army did not announce a dollar figure tied to the contract, but on Thursday a spokesperson told Breaking Defense the contract award for the first plane is $66.4 million and has a value ceiling of $140 million “which would include the acquisition of two additional aircraft for HADES prototypes.” It’s unclear if other firms will provide additional aircraft for prototyping efforts later.

The Army has been investing in new jet-based (ISR) capabilities since 2020, when it began buying what it called aerial technology demonstrators, the first of which was known as ARTEMIS (airborne reconnaissance and target exploitation multi-mission system), aboard a Leidos jet.

“ARTEMIS was our first attempt at putting sensors on a jet to see how that was employed, and we put it in the [Indo-Pacific Command’s Area of Operation] to see what it could do,” Capt. Jonathan Magee, ISR Task Force aerial planner for the Army Military Intelligence Staff, said in an Army publication in March 2023. “All of it was good at the end of the day. It’s informing the HADES POR, program of record, for what we need in the end.”

In addition to making the rounds in the Indo-Pacific, Breaking Defense previously reported that at the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine, ARTEMIS appeared to be taking to the skies in Eastern Europe.

Last month Army Brig. Gen. Ed Barker, program executive for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, told reporters that the HADES system was recently approved to move into middle tier acquisition for rapid prototyping.

Phase one of HADES will include two different aircraft with different sensor packages, and the goal is “to demonstrate the flexible aspect of the capabilities themselves and also to understand the best of breed that we want to pursue from a production standpoint,” he added.

As for the sensor packages, in September 2022 L3 Harris and Raytheon were awarded Army contracts for the development of prototype sensors for the bird.

In its announcement, the Army said the ultimate goal of those prototypes is to “provide advanced deep-sensing capabilities for use in multidomain operations against peer and near-peer adversaries.”

Breaking Defense’s Jaspreet Gill and Ashley Roque contributed to this report.