Counter-UAS: Alpine Eagle expands Sentinel production and plans plant near Munich

Alpine Eagle, a provider specialising in counter-unmanned aircraft systems (counter-UAS), is further expanding production capacity for its Sentinel system. According to a recent company statement, the reason is strong demand for rapidly available, scalable solutions against large-scale drone threats.

Alpine Eagle is seeing clearly growing interest, particularly in Europe. The first customer, the German Bundeswehr (armed forces), deployed the system as early as 2024. Since then, contracts with three further European customers have followed, and the company is now also represented in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands.

Sentinel links an airborne radar and sensor network with a software-defined defence architecture. It is designed to detect, track and engage hostile drones over large areas with airborne interception solutions.

Besides scaling up industrially, Alpine Eagle takes part in international development and test programmes: the company is part of a Dutch innovation programme, has tested under real operational conditions in Ukraine and took part in "Project Vanaheim", a joint trial of counter-UAS capabilities with US and British forces.

The workforce is also growing rapidly. In 2024 Alpine Eagle still had 12 employees; today it has around 50, and by the end of the year the number is set to double to about 100.

Delta Quad as platform, own plant near Munich

To keep production scalable, Alpine Eagle integrates its technology on the Delta Quad Evo platform from Dutch manufacturer Delta Quad, an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The partnership creates industrial manufacturing capacity and strengthens a resilient European supply chain. By combining proven hardware with its own sensors and software, the company hopes to deliver operational systems faster than traditional defence programmes do.

As a further step towards industrial scale, Alpine Eagle is also planning a production facility of around 2,000 square metres near Munich for its own interceptor drones.

Counter-UAS tested under GPS jamming

The technology has already been tested under realistic conditions, including in Ukraine, where systems must work reliably even under GPS jamming and massed drone attacks.

Current conflicts show that the question is also an economic one: expensive air defence systems can be overwhelmed by cheap drones. According to analyses, defensive means worth more than 1.5 billion dollars (around 1.38 billion euros) were expended in the Middle East to repel attacks that probably cost the attacker only about 250 million dollars (around 230 million euros). Such a disparity further increases demand for cost-effective, scalable countermeasures.

Defence ministries are increasingly looking for systems that are rapidly available and can be scaled flexibly— Jan-Hendrik Boelens, founder and CEO of Alpine Eagle

That is exactly the capability the company can deliver, Boelens said, because existing industrial capacity is combined with its own sensors and software.

Boelens also points to the security situation. Europe, he says, faces a greater threat than at any time in decades, and drones are changing warfare faster than conventional systems can respond. Alpine Eagle therefore aims to provide democratic states with the means they need to defend their airspace in this new era.