The Dutch defence ministry has announced it is lending Denmark a number of its unmanned drones. The Danish army is getting two sets of the Raven UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) system, each consisting of a ground station and three hand-launched micro-planes. The whole system can be carried in two rucksacks.
Denmark has been having problems with the supply of spare parts for its reconnaissance drones and all the working units are in use in Afghanistan. This leaves the troops in Denmark with no planes to practice with.
The Ravens are battery powered, can remain in the air for one hour and have a range of 10 kilometres. They are equipped with several video cameras and have night vision. The footage can be viewed from the ground station. (Radio Netherlands Worldwide/imm)
Both Raven systems are redundant (at least in the short term) due to the fact that they are no longer used by the recce platoons of our two former armored battalions. As you might be aware, all Leopard 2 main battle tanks were withdrawn from service last year so these Raven systems became available for other duties. Denmark needed two sytems to continue training at home while most of its own sytems are deployed abroad (Afghanistan)