UAE defense giant tests drone built from a kit plane

UAE-based defense company has shown off a drone built to watch the sky nonstop, and footage of the aircraft reveals it shares its entire airframe with a hobbyist plane sold to private pilots for decades.

EDGE Group, the state-owned Emirati defense conglomerate based in Abu Dhabi that builds everything from missiles to unmanned ground vehicles, posted footage on X of a flight test for its newest unmanned aircraft, the JERNAS-M, describing the system in the post as built for constant vigilance and capable of dependable surveillance and target tracking in an efficient, cost-effective solution built for modern air defense.

“Built for constant vigilance. JERNAS-M provides dependable surveillance and target tracking in an efficient, cost-effective solution built for modern air defence. Delivering the capability that matters, where it matters most,” EDGE Group said.

JERNAS-M is built on the airframe of the Velocity, a composite, canard-winged kit aircraft produced since the 1980s by a small manufacturer based in Sebastian, Florida, and marketed to private pilots who assemble the planes themselves from a kit rather than buying a finished aircraft. The forward canard configuration, meaning a small horizontal wing mounted near the nose instead of a conventional tail, the pusher-propeller arrangement mounted at the rear of the fuselage, the fuselage shape, and the landing gear layout all match the civilian Velocity design directly, down to the shape of the cockpit canopy and the placement of the main gear legs.

Converting an existing, proven civilian airframe into an unmanned platform would explain how the company kept development costs down enough to market JERNAS-M as a genuinely low-cost surveillance drone rather than an entirely new airframe built from a blank sheet of paper.

The JERNAS-M belongs to a category the defense industry calls medium-altitude, long-endurance aircraft, commonly shortened to MALE, meaning it flies high enough and long enough to watch a wide stretch of territory for hours at a stretch without needing to land and refuel, a capability normally reserved for far more expensive purpose-built drones.

EDGE’s own technical specifications describe the aircraft as capable of staying airborne for up to 20 hours when flying pure surveillance missions, or 12 hours when carrying its maximum payload of 280 kilograms (617 pounds), with a maximum takeoff weight of 1,200 kilograms (2,646 pounds) and a line-of-sight operational range of 200 kilometers (124 miles), figures that place it firmly in the same performance class as drones costing several times more from Western and non-Western manufacturers alike, an economics gap that starts to make sense once the aircraft’s civilian-derived airframe enters the picture.

EDGE unveiled the JERNAS-M publicly at the Dubai Airshow in November 2025, positioning the aircraft as a low-cost option built for both reconnaissance and, depending on configuration, ground strikes, expanding on design work the company had already done with an earlier variant called the JERNAS-S. The aircraft comes from ADASI, EDGE’s dedicated autonomous systems subsidiary, which used the same airshow to introduce a broader family of unmanned platforms alongside it, including the Strike fixed-wing weapon carrier and the Vortex-E counter-drone interceptor, part of a wider push by EDGE to be seen not just as a single-product vendor but as a full system integrator capable of supplying air, land, and sea drones from one company.

That positioning matters strategically because EDGE has been actively courting Western defense partnerships to expand its reach beyond the Gulf region. The company signed a joint venture with American drone maker Anduril at the same Dubai Airshow where JERNAS-M debuted, an arrangement centered on a separate aircraft called Omen but one that industry analysts have described as designed to let EDGE’s broader unmanned portfolio, JERNAS-M included, plug into markets and data networks that a UAE-only supplier might otherwise struggle to access, giving European and Asian buyers an alternative sourcing option that blends Gulf manufacturing with Western software and design expertise.

Building a military drone on top of a civilian kit aircraft design is not without precedent in the industry, since repurposing an airframe that has already logged flight hours and proven its aerodynamics in the hands of hundreds of private builders sidesteps years of structural testing and certification work a company would otherwise need to complete from scratch. The Velocity itself has built a track record over roughly four decades in the hands of private owners, tracing its own design lineage back to Burt Rutan’s Long-EZ homebuilt aircraft from the 1970s, a heritage that gives EDGE a starting point with decades of real-world flight data behind it rather than an unproven prototype.