Launched from a 14,000-foot mountain top, Elbit’s Skylark mini UAV recently climbed to an altitude exceeding 15,000 feet before landing at a designated point of recovery. Since that day in May, the Skylark has demonstrated a record-breaking performance in extreme temperatures ranging from minus 17 to plus 50 degrees Celsius in harsh weather conditions.

The high altitude flight demonstration was part of a larger evaluation conducted by a potential customer and Elbit reports that the performance in difficult conditions was testament to the Skylark’s ruggedness and reliability. The mini UAV is the only such system to be selected by the Israel Defense Forces for its ground forces and it is deployed by several countries as part of the coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. The Skylark is quiet in operation and has chalked up some 1,500 operational flights.

Building on this success, Elbit has added a new UAV system to the Skylark family featuring advanced propulsion technology that enables long endurance covert ISTAR (intelligence, surveillance, target acquisition and reconnaissance) capability at 30-mile close range missions. The Skylark II can perform day, night and adverse weather observation, data collection and target marking and has been designed for battlefield deployment using Humvee class all-terrain vehicles.