The AirSniper is no joke, but the AirKnife is

Chris Anderson, over at DIY Drones, recently posted a full page advertisement, from the July edition of the AUVSI magazine, for AUS International’s AirSniper product. The AirSniper is described as, “a VTOL combat mini UAV intended for close infantry support.” Or, in other words, “a gun with wings.”

Now, this idea seems like a solid one – why not mount weapons on UAVs? In fact, it’s been done before. However, I don’t think anyone has every proposed a UAV sniper system that can also be torn-down to work as a regular, old, gun. Also, AUS claims,

Our patent pending “tilt and stop” rotor design concept gives AirSniper hovering performance and agility of helicopters, with speed and endurance of fixed wing airplanes.

Supposedly the airframe also allows for “precise aiming at any flight speed.” Quite a claim. The comedic aspects of the advertisement give some reason to doubt as to AUS International’s ability to bring this to market. Chris even said, “if this were the April edition, I'd think it was an April Fool's joke”.

Some of the more laughable lines from the ad:

For an enemy up there, you could be like a sitting duck.
With AirSniper, sitting duck is the other guy.

WIRED’s DangerRoom blog also got into the action with their latest idea, the AirKnife.

Ok, so after AUS International had been give such a bad rap, what did I do? Well, I contacted them to find out what the skinny was. Check out our correspondance after the jump.

I emailed the sales address listed on the company’s website, and received a friendly reply from Paul Forgac, the Director of Technology for AUS-International.

Air Sniper is currently still in development and is scheduled to be available for sale 1^st quarter of next year.  All the information that we’ve made publicly available about it at this time is on our website.  As more information will become available, we will put it on the web site as well.

Paul also kindly offered to answer any questions we might have about the AirSniper, so I asked him if the project is in its early stages and for more information about the weapon(s) that will be on AirSniper:

The project is about a year old and I would not consider it to be in its early stage, although we have hoped to be a little further down the road when the ad came out. Some of the weapons that can be mounted in AirSniper are listed here, at least by caliber and number of rounds. We do not want to disclose their make and model at this time.

Mr. Forgac declined to comment on whether the AirSniper would employ an automated target acquisition and tracking system. Though, he did say that the platform is very customizable with several different configurations. I also asked about the usefulness of a UAV that doubles as a hand-held weapon:

The “weapon” the soldier is holding is the same fuselage as the flying UAV except the nose and aft portions are removed so it can fit in a backs-pack.  And after splitting it this way, it occurred to us: Why would you need to put it in a backpack?  If we give it a handle, it can be used as a weapon also on ground.

So, there you have it. The AirSniper is real - all of you naysayers can be silenced. Mr. Forgac also said that if anyone has any ideas as to how to make the company's advertisements less comical, he's all ears.