A drone of your own

When a Royal Marine was shot in Afghanistan in January last year during a vicious battle in an old desert fort, his colleagues could not find him in the confusion. As they pulled back to regroup, concern grew that Taliban insurgents had captured him.

Within minutes, the marines had launched a Lockheed Martin Desert Hawk mini-unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to find out what was happening behind enemy lines. Pictures downloaded in real time from the Desert Hawk into a briefcase-sized control unit showed the body in the centre of the fort.

Unsure whether their colleague was dead or wounded, the marines organised a daring rescue mission in which four men strapped themselves on to the outside of two Apache attack helicopters. Unfortunately, by the time they reached their stricken friend, he was dead, but the rescuers were able to retrieve his body.

The incident illustrates the potential advantages of mini-UAVs — or micro air vehicles (MAVs) — that can be carried in a soldier's backpack and used to deliver images to frontline troops.

As well as their operational appeal, MAVs cost a fraction of their larger cousins such as the Predator, Reaper and Global Hawk — tens of thousands rather than millions of pounds for a single system. General Atomics' airliner-sized Reaper UAV can cost more than £5m, excluding the tens of millions of pounds for the supporting communications infrastructure.

The diminutive class of UAV began to earn recognition during the past seven years of conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan. The first front-line users were highly secret special forces operatives who used their 'black' or covert equipment budgets to sidestep conservative procurement bureaucracies and buy large numbers of MAVs for use in the war on terror.

The main reason behind these purchases was the need to over-fly remote Afghan mountain ridges to try to spot small groups of Taliban lying in wait to ambush coalition forces. Britain's elite Special Air Service is known to have tested the Buster mini-UAV, and the regiment's US counterpart was the first big customer for these revolutionary systems. Now most US and British bases in Iraq and Afghanistan have their own flight of mini-UAVs to patrol the perimeter around the clock, looking for hostile forces.

The defining feature of MAVs is that they can be carried and deployed by a single soldier. This means the air vehicle, radio downlink and control unit can all be packed into a single rucksack, then taken into a combat zone.

Beyond this, the market is filled with a diverse array of products. Many are little more than glorified remote-control model aircraft that can be thrown into the air by a soldier. A hand-held remote or joystick control unit is used to fly the craft. These cheap and cheerful products, however, suffer from high wastage rates from accidents and hard landings.