PARIS — Airbus tested a jet-powered interceptor armed with missiles from defense startup Frankenburg Technologies to engage a one-way attack drone, with the companies trumpeting their solution as a cost-effective way of defending against such drones.
The reusable Bird of Prey interceptor drone completed its first demonstration flight at a military training area in northern Germany in a “realistic mission scenario,” the companies said in a joint statement on Monday. The interceptor autonomously searched, detected and classified a medium-sized one-way attack drone, which it then engaged with Frankenburg’s Mark I air-to-air missile.
The war in Ukraine and conflicts in the Middle East have underscored the challenge of defending against relatively low-cost one-way munitions such as Iran’s Shahed drones, which can cost a fraction of the interceptors used to shoot them down, leaving Western militaries and defense firms scrambling to find affordable countermeasures rather than relying on scarce, high-end air-defense missiles.
“Defending against kamikaze drones is a tactical priority that urgently needs to be tackled,” said Mike Schoellhorn, the chief executive officer of Airbus Defence and Space, in a statement. He said the Airbus drone with Frankenburg’s affordable missiles is an “effective, cost-efficient interceptor, filling a crucial capability gap in today’s asymmetric conflict theaters.”
The Bird of Prey drone is based on the jet-powered Airbus Do-DT25 target drone, which has a published maximum speed of 300 knots, or 555 kilometers per hour.
The drone-missile combination makes large-scale interception economically viable, with a single reusable interceptor able to perform multiple air-to-air engagements, with an “order-of-magnitude reduction in cost per intercept,” Frankenburg said in a social-media post. Integration of its missile on the Airbus platform was completed in nine months, according to the startup.
The interceptor-drone prototype has a wingspan of 2.5 meters (8.2 feet) and a maximum takeoff weight of 160 kilograms. The drone in the test was equipped with four of Frankenburg’s Mark 1 missiles, while the operational version will be able to carry eight of the missiles, the companies said.
“This is a defining step for modern air defense,” Frankenburg CEO Kusti Salm said. “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 defense and enabling defense against mass aerial threats at a fundamentally different scale.”
The Frankenburg Mark 1 missile is a high subsonic, fire-and-forget missile with an engagement range of up to 1.5 kilometers (0.9 mile), and its length of 65 centimeters and weight of less than 2 kilograms makes the Mark 1 the lightest guided interceptor developed to date, according to the companies. The missiles are equipped with a fragmentation warhead.
Airbus and Frankenburg plan more test flights in 2026 with a live warhead to move to “further operationalize” the system, and demonstrate its capabilities to potential customers. Bird of Prey is designed to fit into NATO’s integrated air-defense architecture via Airbus’s integrated battle-management system, the companies said.
Rudy Ruitenberg is a Europe correspondent for Defense News. He started his career at Bloomberg News and has experience reporting on technology, commodity markets and politics.
