Tel Aviv: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) of all sorts are playing a greater role in combat. This has been driven by the ongoing war in Ukraine and the recent war with Iran.
Israeli company Elbit Systems unveiled a maritime concept that converts civilian/commercial cargo ships into dedicated UAV-launching platforms, centred on the Hermes 650 Spark fixed-wing drone. According to company sources. each converted vessel would carry 9–12 Hermes 650 Spark aircraft, plus deck infrastructure, control systems, and mission support.
The ship acts as a remote launch/recovery site, managed from the same land-based ground control station used for the larger Hermes 900 — reducing manpower and control stations.
Designed for ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition, reconnaissance) beyond the radar horizon — it comes with greater endurance and payload than VTOL UAVs, plus strike support.
Deck motion, turbulence, and deck obstacles make fixed-wing landings on merchant ships hazardous. Elbit Systems’ solution integrates AI and laser-detection systems that predict deck movement during landings, with drones stored in climate-controlled, salt-resistant containers.
The Hermes -650 supports autonomous takeoff/landing, autonomous taxiing, short-runway operation, and is STANAG 4671 (NATO) compliant; on land it needs ~200 m to take off, though ship-based launch/recovery distances and sea-state limits haven’t been published.
The concept has a notable precedent: Iran’s Shahid Mahdavi proved that a civilian cargo ship can be converted into a forward-operating drone base. Elbit Systems is taking that idea significantly further.
This is still a concept, not a programme. Elbit has not named a customer, conversion partner, flight-test schedule, or service-entry timeline. Army Recognition explicitly frames it as “a distributed surveillance and targeting concept, not as a low-cost substitute for carrier aviation”. Several technical unknowns — ship-based recovery method, admissible sea state, launch/recovery distances — remain undisclosed.
-The writer is an Israel-based freelance journalist. The views expressed are of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of Raksha Anirveda
