Airbus has lifted the veil on its Low-Observable UAV Testbed (LOUT) program, which it has been working on in “Skunk Works”-like secrecy since 2007. The program has recently completed its “iterative camouflage optimization” phase, prompting Airbus and the German defense ministry to partially lift the lid on the project and provide some details about the program. The non-flying testbed was shown to media in carefully controlled conditions while it was mounted on a pole in a radar cross-section (RCS) measurement anechoic chamber at Airbus’s Manching plant in southern Germany.
Having already schemed and tested a heavily faceted stealth fighter that bore some resemblance to Lockheed's then-secret Have Blue/F-117 in the early 1980s as part of the Lampyridae project, Airbus Germany and its MBB/EADS predecessors renewed the study of various stealthy configurations in 2007 in their offices in Bremen and Manching, following which LOUT was formally launched by the German MoD in 2010. By 2015 the baseline shape of LOUT had been fixed. The path to the final shape began with 2D planform evaluations, followed by 3D layouts, and then full 3D configurations. The three most promising were built in scale-model form and tested in the wind tunnel to assess aerodynamic properties before the final configuration was selected.
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