UAVs
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Sea food is well and truly off the menu at EADS this week, following the embarrassing loss of its Barracuda unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) demonstrator to an accident. The 3t air vehicle – named after a long, slender fish – returned to the sea in a so-far unexplained ditching near the end of a weekend test flight from San Javier air base in southern Spain.
Although it can console itself with meat – and weissbier – galore in the beer halls of Munich’s Oktoberfest, this is seriously bad news for EADS, which looked to be lagging behind its European rivals in flying advanced unmanned systems even before the Barracuda mishap. Alenia Aeronautica of Italy, BAE Systems of the UK, Dassault of France and Saab of Sweden all held significant bragging rights over the manufacturer, having each flown company-funded UCAV-like demonstrators over the last couple of years: respectively the Sky-X; Raven; Petit Duc; and Filur designs.
Europe’s unmanned air vehicle sector is a congested place, with several of the continent’s big five military airframers jostling to lead collaborative demonstrations of their combined know-how. The loss of EADS’s showpiece aircraft – which was developed under a project worth around €40 million ($50 million) – confirms what we already knew: Dassault is in pole position to conduct such work, as the lead company on Europe’s French-led Neuron UCAV project. BAE also appears well placed to lead development work in the UK, which seems set to go it alone.
Pardon the pun, but there was something a bit fishy about the Barracuda programme’s achievements to date. EADS refused to comment on the effort for many months, before releasing sketchy details of an initial flight test campaign – also conducted from San Javier – just before April’s Berlin air show, where the design was formally unveiled. Sources from rival manufacturers suggested that something had not gone to plan during this process, as the UCAV flew just once for 20min, but EADS played this down, attributing the lone sortie to “inclement weather”.
The new Barracuda campaign – which I reported on for this week’s print edition of Flight International from EADS Military Air Systems’ technology forum in Munich on 19-20 September – also sounded to be of limited ambition, with the company saying that only two or three flights were planned, to expand the air vehicle’s flight envelope through changes to its altitude and speed. The accident is believed to have happened during the first of these sorties, on 23 September, destroying EADS’s lone Barracuda, which was manufactured around two years ago.
As ever, it’s too early to speculate on what might have happened, but an EADS official said last week that windtunnel tests of the so-called Spiral 0 Barracuda proved that the design was “absolutely stable”. Powered by a Pratt & Whitney Canada JT15D-5C turbofan engine, the air vehicle was controlled without using a joystick on the ground, but by around 10 high-level commands, such as start, go around, and land. Navigation was provided using EGNOS and GPS satellites, with the air vehicle also equipped with a laser altimeter; clever stuff all round, but equally, lots to go wrong.
Regardless of the cause of the Barracuda’s loss, perhaps EADS should steer clear of marine life next time it decides to name one of its projects: let’s not forget that its proposed Mako advanced jet trainer (named after a stealthy species of shark) has also vanished silently into the depths over the last couple of years, following a lukewarm market response. Luckily for the company, as military operators are maybe 15 years away from fielding operational UCAVs, perhaps it has time to recover from this mishap.
Robots are often used in the media to instil fear with Frankenstein like stories of the scientist and corporation having gone to far with a humanoid machine destroying all before it. But on today’s battlefield, and for this US Army sponsored event, and for the war of tomorrow the robots will, apparently, look more like model planes.
On a wind swept car park in the Bavarian town of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, once home to the 1936 winter Olympics, 16 teams battled it out for a top prize that was the opportunity to bid for a $100,000 research contract. Unsurprisingly a lot of the teams were universities.
From video goggles to video screens the operators, sometimes using remote control, others using autopilot software, guided their flying machines into the target area by hand or a waypoint, care of a click of the PC mouse. The mission was to loiter at an altitude, at which you should not be heard, and transmit back images of the target zone, and wait for the “terrorist” to wander in, “satchel explosive” under their arm. The micro air vehicles (MAV) had to operate for 30 minutes and the terrorist be clearly seen in the video picture.
Not as easy as you’d think. A number of the MAVs had battery problems, others couldn’t cope with the wind gusts, others crashed due to pilot error. But every team was given ample opportunity to fly and spot the enemy. Autonomous flight was of key interest to the organisers and four teams all used the same open source software, Paparazzi. In fact they had collaborated on code but the experts were the French national civilian aviation school team. Ecole Nationale l’Aviation Civile (ENAC) developed Paparazzi from another open source software package, Micropilot, which is for helicopters. The ENAC team proved their expertise by having not one fixed wing MAV loiter autonomously around the target zone but two.
However the winning team was from the University of Arizona (with a team member here pictured above holding up the winning MAV) with a well integrated design that looked robust and also used the Paparazzi software. With the right camouflage paint job and an improvement in its endurance and video picture quality the Arizona robot would be useful for any solider seeking to find out what was round the corner. The organisers were impressed with many of the entries and the performance their MAVs provided considering the technology the Army was using in Iraq and what it had to pay to get it. What this competition proved was that useful robot technology is cheap and can be rapidly developed. These autonomous surveillance drones will be key to any war and insurgents can expect to see them long before they encounter a solider.
Technorati tag:
UAV
Craig Hoyle / ParcAberporth
You have to hand it to the backers of the ParcAberporth unmanned air vehicle centre of excellence in west Wales - they certainly have vision.
Welsh Assembly first minister Rhodri Morgan proudly coined the flight demonstration at the site on 7 September as a "flyerless Farnborough" or a "pilotless Paris". But as with every air show, all airspace users are hostage to weather conditions, and solid cloud cover, high winds and scattered showers do not make for good flying. And so it was that the elements conspired against ParcAberporth 2005, limiting the airborne element of the day to the numerous light aircraft and helicopters which delivered the luckier visitors (the rest of us "enjoyed" an almost two-hour coach journey each way from Swansea) and Elbit Systems' Hermes 450. The Israeli system - the basis for the UK's future Thales-led Watchkeeper UAV - managed to beat the weather conditions by performing an early morning take-off.
Luckily, a pre-demonstration of the Hermes 450 conducted from ParcAberporth on 5 September proved more insightful, and I was lucky enough to receive a full briefing on the system's capabilities, as well as see the UAV and its ground control station up close, watching imagery from its electro-optic and infrared payload. And flying in from Cardiff that day was a world away from the bus ride that was to follow.
In flying terms ParcAberporth failed to live up to its billing as a pilotless Paris, with original plans for 11 air vehicle demonstrations trimmed to four by certification, time and cost considerations and eventually restricted to one by the weather. But the number of visitors and exhibitors doubled over last year's inaugural event, and infrastructure at the West Wales airport site has leapt ahead during the same period.
From humble beginnings great things can grow, and the Welsh Development Agency is demonstrating the highest level of support for the ParcAberporth initiative. The message from this year's event is clear - expect much more in 2006 and for many years to come.
Technorati tag:
UAV ParcAberporth
Although the US Air Force has got into difficulties with its RQ-4A Global Hawks, the incident that sparked the trouble is actually quite comforting.
One of our reporters listened in as military controllers warned
nearby aircraft that a Global Hawk was returning Edwards AFB after an
engine failure. It's the sort of situation that, if it had been a
manned aircraft, would have had everyone for miles around fearing for
the safety of the crew, other aircraft, and even people on the ground.
But the outcome was entirely benign, with the aircraft following a
pre-planned pattern to glide back to base. That's impressive: up close
the Global Hawk is a fair-sized aeroplane,
powered by a serious jet engine, and generally to be treated with
considerable respect. Such a smooth outcome to what was a challenging
situation bodes well for the unmanned aviation community, especially to
the parts of it with aspirations to operate in civil airspace.
Systems will malfunction on these aircraft just as they do on manned
types, but, as with manned types, it's what you do next that counts.
As
far as unmanned aviation has come in the last decade, it remains the
rare niche aviation market that can’t agree on what to call its
signature product.
As an acronym, do we call them a UAV, UA or UAS? As a word, should we describe them as unmanned, uninhabited or unpiloted?
Never
one to join the crowd, the US Air Force has coined its own new term:
Remotely Operated Aircraft (ROA, anyone? Frankly, we think that’s
already DOA, or should be).
Now, the US Department of Defense is proposing to settle this nomenclature madness once and for all. Here is DOD's new and long-awaited Unmanned Aircraft Systems Roadmap. Among other things, it decrees the term UAV is passé.
Henceforth,
the DOD will recognize two terms: an unmanned aircraft (UA) and an
unmanned aircraft system (UAS). The UA is to be used when referring to
the flying component of a UAS, which refers to a ground station linked
with one or more UAs.
“This
change in terminology more clearly emphasizes that the aircraft is only
one component of the system, and is in line with the Federal Aviation
Administration’s decision to treat ‘UAVs’ as aircraft for regulatory
purposes,” a footnote reads.
There
may be some logic to this. It reflects the fact that unmanned flight
requires more than just an aircraft to work – and, thus, for
governments to regulate. And it substitutes the smoother word,
“aircraft”, for the clunky and possibly anachronistic term,“air
vehicle.” (Who came up with “unmanned air vehicle” anyway? Any
theories?)
But
there is a catch. Even if the aim is to clarify, it doesn’t do you any
favours if few others in the English-speaking world know the difference
between a UAS and a UA. Or, for that matter, a UAS and a UAV.
It
is something we’re thinking about among our editorial team. Flight
International uses the term UAV, which has its flaws but at least is
commonly understood. This may have to be discarded at some point, but
we are asking two questions: when? and with what?
Technorati tag:
UAV
