, the first Artemis has already seen action in the Ukraine War, making use of the aircraft’s ability to fly at high altitudes for long ranges. “These [planes] can see very far when operating at 40,000 feet,” Mike Chagnon, deputy group president of Leidos Defense Group, told the website.
In the last year, Artemis 1 has flown more than 370 missions to monitor Russian forces near the Ukraine border. “You’re flying basically in a mow-the-lawn-type pattern for 10 hours [and] you’re collecting massive amounts of data,” Chagnon said. The business jet flew an average of six days per week.The unarmed 650s don’t fly in “contested” airspace so can avoid hostile fighter jets and surface-to-air missiles. Instead, they use altitude and long-distance monitoring equipment to collect data.
Leidos has a second Challenger 650 in Virginia that has also been modified for the US Army as a technology demonstrator. L3Harris Technologies is also developing similar business jet intelligence aircraft called ARES. The aircraft are taking part in the US Army’s High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System , a strategy for gathering high-flying intelligence. The idea is to replace the current turboprops that were used in the Afghanistan and Iraqi conflicts searching for roadside bombs and insurgents with a more advanced, less vulnerable aircraft technology. “They want multi-layer sensing capabilities from space to mud,” Chagnon told Defenseone.com. “This is the airborne layer.
Leidos has also purchased two larger Bombardier Global 6500 aircraft that it intends to convert into spy planes for another Army competition called ATHENA-R. Its competitor L3Harris, working with MAG Aerospace team and Sierra Nevada, is also converting Global 6500s for the same spy-jet competition.