Turgis Gaillard

Turgis Gaillard started in 2011 as a two-person engineering office doing industrial work for the French armed forces and has grown into a group of around 400 people turning over 80 million euros across nine sites in France. For most of that time it was invisible, a subcontractor welding pipework, fabricating tooling and maintaining aircraft for other people's programmes. That changed at the 2023 Paris Air Show, when the company rolled out a medium altitude long endurance drone nobody in the French procurement system had asked it to build.

The AAROK is the reason the company is now discussed alongside the primes. It has a 22 metre wingspan sized to fit standard NATO airbase hangars, a maximum take-off weight of 5.5 tonnes, an empty weight of 2.5 tonnes, and roughly 3 tonnes of payload capacity including fuel, mission equipment and up to 1.5 tonnes of weapons. It was developed on private money as a French-built answer to the American Reaper, and the prototype made its first flight from Blois-Le Breuil airfield in September 2025 with a safety pilot aboard, reaching 5,000 feet on a flight of just under an hour. Thales agreed in June 2025 to integrate its AirMaster S active electronically scanned array radar into a surveillance version. The land equivalent arrived in 2025 as Foudre, a rocket artillery system built in secret on company funds, armoured and air-transportable on a six-wheel-drive chassis with central tyre inflation, able to fire French or foreign munitions out to between 75 and 1,000 kilometres. It is pitched at replacing the French Army's LRU launchers before they retire at the end of 2027, and Airbus has since partnered on the programme.

Two other systems fill out the portfolio. NITRATHE is an intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance pod that mounts on a transport aircraft in place of an air-to-air refuelling pod, carrying a 25 inch class optronic sensor that identifies objects beyond 20 kilometres day or night, fixes their coordinates and designates for laser-guided weapons. ODIN is a battlefield airborne communications node and command suite that fuses sensor and mission data into a secure data lake and connects to NATO networks including Link 16. Foudre, AAROK and ODIN are designed to work as one sensor-to-shooter chain. Underneath all of it the original mission support business continues, covering sheet metal work, welding, pipework and metallic construction, aircraft maintenance repair and overhaul, ground support equipment, tooling and aircraft parts, ground vehicle maintenance, ship and port facility upkeep, and signals intelligence and communications infrastructure work. The company organises this across air, land, sea, space and joint all-domain command and control. Growth has been fast, from roughly 300 staff to 400 in the space of a couple of years, and Foudre is being pitched at export customers as a European alternative to the American HIMARS.