A Maryland Army National Guard detachment operating the Shadow 200 tactical unmanned aerial vehicle will officially open for business here Feb. 5, with a 2 p.m. ribbon-cutting ceremony at the new armory located next to Gate 3. The event will feature a non-flying display of the aircraft perched on a 40′ long rail launcher, a ground-control station in a Humvee van, video of the aircraft in action and soldiers who flew Shadow last year in Iraq.
“I think it’s awesome,” says Sgt. Ericka Gillespie, an Iraq vet from the Shadow Tactical UAV platoon, who likes the system’s ability to keep pilots out of harm’s way. “We don’t have to have someone up there flying it.” The platoon mission commander, Specialist James Sirmons, says Shadow is “amazing. Its use will just keep growing in the future.”
The Shadow TUAV platoon of Charlie Company, 629th Military Intelligence battalion, won’t begin flying the aircraft in southern Maryland until at least June, according to Col. Charles Schulze of the Guard’s Aviation Brigade at Aberdeen Proving Ground, Md., where the system is staged. A transitional, tensioned-fabric hangar and modular office space at the Webster Field annex will have to be completed to house the unit.
Construction of the transitional facilities could get underway as early as February and will take four to five months to complete, says Schulze, who is Maryland’s State Army Aviation Officer. Platoon headquarters will remain in the armory, known officially as the Patuxent Readiness Center.
The Shadow TUAV platoon, which returned last October from a year-long Iraq deployment, will be an operational unit focused on training rather than testing, according to Schulze. Guard soldiers will train mostly on Saturday and Sunday, with the possibility of an occasional weekday flight, he says. Only five or six full-time support soldiers will be stationed here during the week.
Schulze says the TUAV platoon is moving to Pax River because of its “UAV-friendly environment.” He notes that Pax has far more radar capability and available airspace than Aberdeen, which is devoted primarily to testing artillery. “Pax already has a training area established for VC-6 [which flies the Pioneer UAV], and they can help us develop our operations,” he says. “This is a great opportunity to learn from the Navy’s experience.”
The RQ-7B Shadow 200 looks like a smaller version of the venerable RQ-2B Pioneer,, first deployed in its “A” incarnation by the Navy in 1986 and now flown by the VC-6 detachment at Webster Field. Shadow is 11′2″ in length with a 12′9″ wingspan, while Pioneer is 14′ long with a 17′ wingspan. Both aircraft have a similar downward-sloping nose, rectangular-section fuselage, and pusher propeller spinning between twin tail booms.
Source and more info: dcmilitary
