BIRD Aerosystems Ltd.

BIRD Aerosystems was founded in Herzliya in 2001 by Ronen Factor, David Dragucki and Zahi Ari, and it has grown around a specific problem that larger electronic warfare houses tend to treat as a subsystem: telling a real shoulder-launched missile apart from a flare, a welding arc or a reflection, fast enough to do something about it. False alarms are the reason many aircraft self-protection fits are switched off in practice. BIRD's answer is the Missile Approach Confirmation Sensor, a semi-active radar that takes the cue from a missile warning sensor and confirms or rejects it before countermeasures fire, driving the false alarm rate close to zero.

That sensor anchors the Airborne Missile Protection Systems family. AMPS-MV pairs the confirmation radar with flare dispensing for transport and rotary fleets, while AMPS-MD adds SPREOS, BIRD's directional infrared countermeasure. SPREOS combines a dual-band semi-active radar with a quantum cascade laser turret, so the same unit confirms the threat, classifies it, tracks it and jams the seeker, rather than handing the job between three boxes. The system was developed in cooperation with Airbus Defence and Space, is installed on well over two thousand aircraft including Mi-17 helicopter fleets, and the company claims most of the addressable market outside the United States. For business jets and head-of-state aircraft where cutting into the airframe is unwelcome, AEROSHIELD packages the whole suite into an external pod, an approach selected for Bombardier Global 7500 and Gulfstream G700 configurations and used on a VIP Boeing 737 fit.

The second business is ASIO, an airborne surveillance, information and observation offering that BIRD sells as a task force rather than a box. A customer gets mission aircraft fitted with radar and electro-optic sensors, the MSIS mission management system that fuses and prioritises what those sensors return and raises automatic alerts on suspicious behaviour, the RCD radar control and display console, and the datalinks that let aircraft, patrol vessels and a shore headquarters look at the same picture. Maritime work covers piracy, smuggling, illegal fishing and pollution monitoring, and BIRD delivered a complete maritime task force to an African state. Ground, border and police variants of the same architecture handle intrusion detection, infrastructure protection, search and rescue and traffic enforcement. The mission software has also been sold as a component to others: HENSOLDT contracted BIRD to build the control interface for its PrecISR multi-mode radar family using RCD and MSIS, then extended the work under a follow-on. Underneath both lines sits a services arm that does the unglamorous part, designing installations, running the certification campaigns, supplying aviation logistics and operating maintenance and repair for the fleets it has equipped. The company remains privately held.