Smaller-scale, Focused Acquisitions Continue to Shape the S&T Industry

In terms of monetary value, brand-name recognition and other criteria, four significant, representative acquisition announcements from earlier this decade upended the broad simulation and training community: 

• CAE concluded its acquisition of L3Harris Technologies’ Military Training;
• BAE Systems completed the acquisition of Bohemia Interactive Simulations (BISim);
• L3Harris Technologies’ agreed for an affiliate of TJC L.P. to acquire L3Harris’ Commercial Aviation Solutions business; and
• FRASCA joined forces with FlightSafety International.

The macro-economic forces that tapped the brakes on other major S&T mergers and acquisitions following these activities, including increasing, post-pandemic interest rates, and business valuations that largely locked into their pre-pandemic levels had settled out this winter. A new set of dynamics, including tariffs and key stock exchanges trending downward, have emerged this spring to again challenge corporate financial teams, deal-makers, private equity firms and others in this industry segment.

Fisal and financial road bumps aside, we’ve observed a number of smaller, focused acquisitions in the last six months that will strengthen disparate parts of the simulation and training industry.

Training Humans and Providing ML

This past 2 December Aechelon Technology, Inc. announced the acquisition of Compro Computer Services’ Radar Simulation Division. The transaction included Compro’s Radar Toolkit (RTK), along with all associated assets, employees, contracts, software, and intellectual property.

With this acquisition Aechelon is integrating its models and image generators, with on-going work in AI and data and other efforts, with the RTK and its portfolio – creating an ecosystem with the capability to train humans and provide ML.

The author gained additional insights on the acquisition from Javier Castellar, Aechelon Co-Founder and CSO. Discussion highlights follow.

Castellar significantly added that current government use cases for Aechelon products and services transcend live operations, with a special emphasis on mission rehearsal – creating another imperative to expand its competencies in radar simulation. Indeed, beyond training humans, Aechelon is also bringing to bear its capabilities in AI and other technologies to “train machines – that is exactly what we are doing.”

The acquisition builds upon Achelon’s multi-decade relationship with Compro’s Radar Simulation Division, allowing customers who previously dealt with both companies to now have a “one-stop” fixed-firm-price business transaction. And then there is data, increasingly prominent as a training and mission readiness enabler throughout government portfolios. To this point, the Aechelon leader noted the same data that feeds the radar feeds the tactical radar, semi-automatic forces, electronic warfare and complex terrain. “So, now we don’t just make pixels. We make data that flows through the synthetic environment. And while that was already happening, this acquisition makes it much more efficient.”

Another huge ROI from the acquisition was the Compro RTK immediate availability. Castellar candidly noted it would have taken Aechelon about two decades to develop the product with its own resources.

The RTK further permits Aechelon to expand its business model beyond large-scale (theater-level), electronic-scan radars and offer customers alternatives. “If the customer decides to use RTK, they use it, otherwise they use our open-streaming of terrain that we support for any other vendor’s radar. Because we are now highly integrated in a multi-GPU [graphics processing unit] system, they can do more things for training. We can run RTK onboard aircraft – opening up the possibility for C2 training and live virtual ISR. And we can exploit our systems as a bridge to a sensor that can be exploited for situational awareness or even GPS-denied navigation.” Castellar quantified these expanded use cases in another context: by using Aechelon’s existing, world-wide terrain model library, the customer can “create millions and millions of hours of radar simulation for targets and terrain for training automatic targeting systems, in essence supporting machine learning [ML].”

As a sidebar, almost concurrent with the late 2024 Compro acquisition, Aechelon announced its partnership with Finland-based ICEYE. The agreement helps bring cutting-edge synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite technology with real-time sensor fusion and ML exploitation capabilities to the market.

Castellar concluded, Aechelon’s acquisition of Compro’s Radar Simulation Division and its expanding collaborative efforts with the likes of ICEYE and other companies in the broad technology sector, “are going to accelerate use cases for modeling and simulation very, very rapidly.”

And in the wake of this development and remaining in the defense vertical space, this 8 April, we noted JF Taylor acquired Bugeye Technologies.

Commercial Aviation Training Organization Acquisition

This is not intended to be an “I told you so” moment. But Alexandre Alves, Global COO and CCO at Airways Aviation Group (Airways Aviation), did tell this author in an interview posted last 2 December, “What you will certainly see is Airways expanding in 2025 in the markets where we already operate…Airways Aviation is eyeing other flight school acquisitions, in India, Europe and beyond.” On cue, this 7 January Airways Aviation announced it acquired Patria Pilot Training Oy, a Finish company dedicated to professional pilot training and until then part of state-owned Patria Group.

The “demand signal” for trained and qualified pilots, maintenance technicians, cabin crew and other airline professionals will remain strong through 2025. Halldale will continue to monitor and provide insights on acquisition activities throughout the broad commercial aviation training enterprise gained during its events and through its CAT department.

Strengthening S&T Beyond Training

Halldale’s Safety Critical Department continues to report and comment on developments in the expanding S&T community well beyond the military and civil aviation training enterprises. Also this 8 April, Comply365, a global provider of operational content, safety and training management solutions for the aviation, rail, defense and space industries, announced the acquisition of Rolls-Royce’s SMS business, a global provider of safety and compliance management systems.

Acquisitions are on our Watchlist

As this article was submitted the US and other global economies were showing signs of strain. At the same time, there remains a pent-up demand for training enterprises to invest in a number of evolving technologies, from AI to XR and others, to bolster their training audiences’ performance in the defense, civil aviation and safety critical industries’ spaces. While the S&T industry may not see the blockbuster-type acquisitions witnessed earlier this decade, there are opportunities for companies to join forces with businesses in and beyond their sectors to increase their competitiveness and expand their portfolios. Halldale looks forward to following and commenting on these business activities.