Schiebel

Schiebel opened in Vienna in 1951, and for most of its life the money came from something other than drones. Mine detectors became the house speciality in the mid-1980s and remain a full product line today. The AN-19/2 mine detecting set is among the most widely fielded hand-held detectors anywhere, adopted across NATO and carried by the US Army under the designation AN/PSS-12, with a battery life measured in tens of hours and an engineering bias toward starting reliably after long spells in storage. ATMID carried that lineage into lateritic ground, where high iron and aluminium oxide content defeats ordinary coils, and it sells both as a standalone detector and as an upgrade for older AN-19/2 sets. VAMIDS puts the same sensing on a vehicle, preferably a mine-protected one, sweeping a route ahead of troops and marking every metallic contact for follow-up clearance on foot.

Unmanned aircraft work began in the mid-1990s and is what most customers now associate with the name. The CAMCOPTER S-100 is a single-rotor vertical take-off aircraft built around the assumption that it will be launched from a moving frigate deck in bad weather rather than a runway. Endurance runs to about ten hours, payloads swap between electro-optical and infrared turrets, maritime radar, signals intelligence and automatic identification system receivers, and more than 500 aircraft have been delivered over three decades. The S-300 is the larger follow-on, aimed at roughly 24 hours aloft and heavier sensor fits. Its first flight test campaign finished at the CESA Drones site at Sainte-Helene near Bordeaux, reaching 100 flight hours in a military test environment while the team opened up the flight envelope.

September 2025 brought a change of direction. At DSEI in London the group announced Schiebel Defence GmbH, a new subsidiary in Wiener Neustadt, and with it the CAMCOPTER S-101 and S-301, armed derivatives of the two civil and surveillance airframes. The pitch is integration of missiles and rockets already in service on crewed rotorcraft, so that a ship or a light brigade gets a strike option without a new munition supply chain, alongside manned unmanned teaming and on-board artificial intelligence for target recognition. Roughly 300 staff work for the group, most of them at a 23,000 square metre plant in Wiener Neustadt that does its own composite layup and 3D titanium printing under AS/EN 9100 approval. Sales and support offices sit in Abu Dhabi, London, Manassas in Virginia, Riyadh, Seoul, Shoalhaven in Australia and Toulon.

A good deal of the business is sold as work performed rather than hardware handed over. Schiebel flies contractor-owned and contractor-operated surveillance sorties for civil agencies, most visibly the European Maritime Safety Agency, which charters S-100 flights for coastguards policing fisheries, pollution and migration in European waters. Training for customer crews, payload integration engineering and through-life support round out the offer.