FN Herstal, the world’s leading designer and manufacturer of small calibre weapons and integrated weapon systems, will showcase its new FN® Airborne Extended Digital Suite at the DSEI international trade show, London, from 14 to 17 September 2021. This suite further enhances combat capabilities of rotary- and fixed-wing airborne platforms by integrating high-performance equipment such as laser guided and/or unguided rockets from Thales, digital machine gun pods from FN Herstal and EO/IR systems from Safran. In 2018, FN Herstal introduced its FN® Airborne Digital Suite comprising: the digital FN® D-HUD Head-Up Display, the digital FN® D-PC Pod Controller and the self-contained fixed forwardfiring digital FN® D-Pod system.
Today, the Belgium-based company has pushed ahead the development of the Digital Suite that now allows the integration of FN Herstal and Third-Parties equipment onto rotary- and fixed-wing airborne platforms: the FN® Airborne Extended Digital Suite. The FN® Airborne Extended Digital Suite allows the integration of multi-functional displays such as the MDU-268V2 display from Scioteq used to select the armaments and display the digital video from the EO/IR.
Based on the initial infrastructure, the FN® Airborne Extended Digital Suite allows airborne platforms to widen the choice of integrated airborne fixed forward-firing weapon solutions with unprecedented firing capabilities. Besides the .50 cal machine gun in the FN® D-Pod, lightweight rocket launchers available in 7, 12 or 19 tubes allow a mix of 70mm laser guided and/or unguided rockets (such as FZ231 from Thales Belgium) delivering metric accuracy at extended range (exceeding 7km on static targets) to defeat soft and light armoured targets. The FN® Airborne Extended Digital Suite also accepts EO/IR equipment such as the ultra-long range electrooptical system Euroflir 410™ from Safran incorporating up to 10 sensors.
The FN® Airborne Extended Digital Suite allows high-value equipment from several different suppliers to be fully integrated. This gives the customer a very wide range of capabilities to choose from, and ensures that they will operate reliably together. FN Herstal, as a weapon systems integrator, once again, has put its expertise and innovation to work to ensure the highest level of operational capability and top quality service for military forces around the world.
