Objectives of the Product

Government agencies, civil protection authorities, security forces, and critical-infrastructure operators face increasing difficulty in monitoring and managing vast and complex territories.

In Portugal, for example, ensuring continuous surveillance of the 3.8 million km² Extended Exclusive Economic Zone, detecting illegal activities, assessing environmental risks, and responding to disasters such as recurrent wildfires remain major challenges.

Current solutions like manned aircraft, satellites, and ground-based systems suffer from high operational costs, limited persistence, and insufficient real-time responsiveness. These gaps lead to delayed detection, reduced situational awareness, and suboptimal decision-making during emergencies.

The proposed product addresses these limitations through a novel unmanned, hybrid high-altitude aircraft capable of long-endurance, energy-autonomous operation.

Combining lighter-than-air buoyancy with high-altitude aerodynamic performance and a multifunctional solar-hydrogen energy system, the platform can remain on station for multiple months while carrying communication, sensing, and surveillance payloads.

By deploying a small network of such High-Altitude Pseudo-Satellites (HAPS), users gain persistent, wide-area monitoring capability that supports maritime surveillance, environmental protection, disaster response, border security, and digital-connectivity expansion. This product provides a cost-effective, flexible, and rapidly deployable alternative to satellites and manned aviation, enabling continuous, real-time awareness over large regions and enhancing national and civilian resilience.

Customers and their Needs

The Skyward VIGIL platform targets a broad range of customers across four main sectors: public safety agencies, telecommunications operators, Earth observation and scientific research institutions, and government and defence clients.

• Public safety agencies require continuous monitoring capabilities for search and rescue, wildfire detection, flood management, crowd control and traffic regulation.
• Telecommunications operators need persistent coverage solutions for rural and remote areas, disaster recovery communications and remote sea and ocean coverage.
• Research and scientific institutions require Earth observation capabilities including precision agriculture, deforestation mapping, air quality monitoring, urban heat island measurements and meteorological data recording.
• Government and defence clients demand reliable surveillance for maritime and border monitoring, offshore platform oversight, critical site monitoring and robust communication nodes for high-speed datalinks and combat net radios.

Targeted customer/users countries

The primary target market is Portugal, with expansion potential to European and international customers.

Product description

The product under development is a next-generation unmanned HAPS designed to provide persistent, wide-area monitoring and communication services. It is a hybrid aircraft combining lighter-than-air buoyancy at low altitude with efficient fixed-wing aerodynamics in the stratosphere, enabling stable, long-endurance operation.

The system’s innovative aspects include:

• Hybrid aerodynamic-aerostatic design with a multifunctional structural integration of solar and storage elements, and a fully renewable, closed-loop energy system.
• Payload agnosticism designed to accommodate a wide range of sensors and communication payloads for Earth observation, telecom relay, and surveillance applications across government, environmental, and commercial users.
• Rapid deployment from existing airfields, with minimal operational footprint.

Customers, such as environmental agencies, maritime authorities, emergency services, and communication providers, interact via a ground mission control system to task the aircraft, manage payloads, receive real-time data, and adjust coverage areas remotely, delivering a flexible and cost-effective alternative to traditional aircraft or satellites.

Added Value

The Skyward VIGIL platform differentiates itself through its hybrid configuration, combining buoyancy and aerodynamic lift. Existing competitors rely exclusively on either aerostatic platforms, limited in maneuverability and vulnerable to wind disturbances, or aerodynamic platforms, which require continuous propulsive power and are constrained by structural weight.

By leveraging the advantages of both approaches, the hybrid configuration reduces the lift power required while providing maneuverability and stability, resulting in longer endurance, greater payload capacity and lower energy consumption than purely aerostatic or aerodynamic competitors.

Current Status

On-going activities focus on the Conceptual Design of the Skyward VIGIL hybrid HAPS. Customer consultation and supplier engagement are ongoing, with trade-off analyses on the hybrid buoyancy and aerodynamic lift configuration, energy budget and payload integration running in parallel.

This phase will produce the consolidated system architecture, allowing for the definition of the energy production and storage solution and the refinement of the platform’s operational and monitoring services.