Transparent UAS model displays connector placement
BlogJune 16, 2026
EUROSATORY: Paris, France. When you’ve been to hundreds of trade shows booth displays can often look the same after a while, the folks at TWE Connectivity this week got creative with how they show where their different products would be found in uncrewed aerial system (UAS).
“People really comment on one is our ability to show components in a system, Matthew McAlonis, Global leader of Engineering- Aerospace Defense & Marine Integrated Systems Group, TE Connectivity, told me at Eurosatory this week. “We have a team called Advanced Systems and Architecture, so we're able to take a sensor type of system and show how it connects into data processing to navigation, propulsion, launch, power, now all these subsystems within a bigger ecosystem.”
He pointed to a transparent mock-up of a UAS (pictured above), with TE products placed throughout the platform to show where they fit into the UAS and explain their functionality and contribution to the overall aircraft.
With an unmanned platform, “you'll have a sensor system up [near the nose] that could be looking at visual video, infrared video, maybe night vision video, doing surveillance, and in the back end we have the purple cable, the fiber optics, so you could take that video signal and then switch it to an electro optic signal, so the optics could then come in, and we're showing different types of optics.”
For drone use TE’s Wild Cat connectors are also in the mock-up. These micro connectors, are for drone “applications like what you will see at Eurosatory this week,” he added.
“For small UAS applications designers just need a quick, quarter turn disconnect and the Wild Cat can provide that,” McAlonis said.
For more on the Wildcat connector, click here or visit TE Connectivity at Eurosatory, Hall 5A Booth J410.
