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BY MARK WORGAN

The experimental ‘Bird of Prey’ interceptor drone, designed to tackle kamikaze drones like Iran’s now infamous Shaheds, has completed its first demonstration test.

Airbus’s new drone completed the demonstration at a military training area in northern Germany.

During the trial, the “Bird of Prey” drone was deployed in a realistic mission scenario, where it autonomously searched for, detected, and classified a medium-sized one-way attack, or “kamikaze”, drone. After identifying the target, it engaged it using a Mark I air-to-air missile developed by defence technology start-up Frankenburg Technologies.

“Against the current geopolitical and military backdrop, defending against kamikaze drones is a tactical priority that urgently needs to be tackled,” said Mike Schoellhorn, chief executive of Airbus Defence and Space. “With our Bird of Prey and Frankenburg’s affordable Mark I missiles, we are providing armed forces with an effective, cost-efficient interceptor, filling a crucial capability gap in today’s asymmetric conflict theatres. The integration of Bird of Prey into Airbus’ air defence battle management suite IBMS acts as a force multiplier.”

“This is a defining step for modern air defence,” said Kusti Salm, chief executive of Frankenburg Technologies. ”Together with Airbus, it marks the first integration of a new class of low-cost, mass-manufacturable interceptor missiles onto a drone, creating a new cost curve for air defence and enabling defence against mass aerial threats at a fundamentally different scale.”

The demonstration flight took place nine months after the project began. The prototype is based on a modified Airbus Do-DT25 drone and has a wingspan of 2.5 metres, a length of 3.1 metres, and a maximum take-off weight of 160kg.
In the test configuration, it carried four Mark I missiles, although the operational version is expected to carry up to eight. The high-subsonic, fire-and-forget missiles have a range of up to 1.5 kilometres and weigh less than 2kg each, making them among the lightest guided interceptors developed to date. They are fitted with a fragmentation warhead designed to neutralise targets at close range.

Developers say the reusable drone could engage multiple targets during a single mission at relatively low cost, offering a potential response to the growing use of one-way attack drones in modern conflicts such as Russia’s war in Ukraine and the conflict in the Middle East.

The system has been designed to operate within NATO’s integrated air defence architecture using established command-and-control systems centred on Airbus’s Integrated Battle Management System.

Airbus and Frankenburg Technologies say further test flights, including trials with live warheads, are planned throughout 2026 as they seek to bring the system closer to operational use and demonstrate its capabilities to potential customers.