Building Valiant

Some aerospace companies build aircraft. Griffon Aerospace builds platforms that help protect the people flying them.

For more than two decades, Griffon has quietly become one of the defense industry’s most innovative UAS manufacturers. Since earning its first prime contract with the U.S. Army in 2003 for the MQM-170A Outlaw aerial target program, the company has continually expanded its portfolio of unmanned aircraft designed for demanding military missions.

Their newest platform, Valiant, represents the next step in that evolution.

Designed as a Group 3 expeditionary VTOL aircraft, Valiant combines long endurance, high useful payload capacity, modular payload integration, contested logistics support, and on-the-move command and control into a single tactical platform. It’s built to operate wherever the mission takes it, not just where infrastructure exists.

Designing aircraft like Valiant means every subsystem has to justify its place onboard. Weight, power consumption, reliability, and available space are all finite resources.

The Challenge: Beyond Layer 2 Switching

Modern UAS platforms are essentially flying computer networks.

Inside Valiant, Ethernet connects the onboard compute module, mission sensors, payloads, and wireless communications equipment. But simply connecting devices together wasn’t enough. Griffon needed to separate traffic traveling to the aircraft from traffic flowing inside it.

The wireless radio required its own WAN interface while the onboard computers and sensors needed to remain on an isolated LAN. That separation allows the aircraft to:

• Prevent unsolicited traffic arriving over the wireless link.

• Eliminate IP address conflicts between the ground station and onboard devices.

• Apply different routing and traffic policies to internal systems versus the external communications link.

• Keep mission-critical onboard traffic isolated from the radio network.

Those capabilities require routing, not just Layer 2 switching. The challenge was finding a router designed for an aircraft rather than a server rack.

The Search for an Embedded Router

At first glance, products like Cisco’s ESR6300 Embedded Series Router appeared to fit the application. But they introduced a different set of engineering problems. The router module itself isn’t a complete embedded solution. It requires a custom carrier board—or Cisco’s large development kit—to access its interfaces, increasing integration effort, size, cost, and risk. It also consumed considerably more power than the application required, accepted only limited input voltages, and occupied valuable space inside the aircraft.

For Valiant, it was just more hardware than the mission demanded. Griffon wasn’t looking for an enterprise router squeezed into an aircraft. They were looking for an aircraft router.

The Solution: A Better Fit

Instead, Griffon selected BotBlox’s Rugged SOM paired with the SwitchBlox Rugged.

The complete solution delivers full routing capability in a compact, flight-ready package while consuming only around 1.5 watts of power. Measuring just 44.5 × 44.5 × 25 mm, it occupies a fraction of the volume of traditional embedded routers while accepting a wide 5–60 VDC input range with reverse polarity and transient protection already built in. The platform is also engineered for the environments unmanned aircraft actually experience, with MIL-STD-810H testing and an operating temperature range from –50°C to +110°C. And unlike many embedded networking products, the hardware ships with ruggedized cable-ready connectors already integrated. There is no need to design a custom carrier board before the system can be installed.

That was the solution. Griffon no longer had to wrestle with integrating networking hardware. They finally had a compact platform that did exactly what Valiant needed.

To compare:

The Results: Full Routing in a Flight-Ready Package

Valiant now flies with full routing onboard in a 44.5 × 44.5 × 25 mm package drawing around 1.5 W — running on the same 5–60 V power architecture as the rest of the aircraft.