Aims To Make The Skies Safer For Flesh-And-Blood Pilots
At an International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Exploratory Meeting on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in Montreal recently, the International Council of Aircraft Owner and Pilot Associations (IAOPA) called for measures to make UAVs compatible with existing air traffic, ensuring equivalent or higher levels of safety.
“Integrating UAVs with manned aircraft creates significant risks that can only be mitigated by strict certification and operational standards designed to ensure safe operations,” said Frank Hofmann, IAOPA representative to ICAO.
Representatives from various states and the UAV industry, as well as airspace users met at ICAO headquarters to discuss the role of ICAO in establishing standards and recommended practices for these new devices.
Source and more info: aero-news
Spain’s Basque region provincial government is to stage an unmanned air vehicle-based fisheries surveillance and protection demonstration from August until late in the year using a new purpose-developed air vehicle.
The civil UAV demonstration has been in the planning stage for 18 months, with prime contractor Aerovision already having undertaken flight trials of the new UAV – designated Fulmar.
The fisheries surveillance demonstration is believed to be the first of its kind in Europe.
Similar trials have previously been carried out in the USA by Insitu using its purpose-developed SeaScan UAV, which has since been developed with Boeing into the ScanEagle system.
Fulmar is a 3m (10ft)-span flying wing design augmented with two cranked tail surfaces either side of a centrally mounted internal combustion engine with pusher propeller.
Source and more info: flightglobal
When Mark Vanderheiden began working for United American Video Corp. seven years ago, the company felt like family.
Under former owner Jerry Pettus, employees had been rewarded for their hard work, said Vanderheiden. UAV makes and distributes DVDs and CDs to stores, such as Wal-Mart and CVS.
Everything changed when Pettus sold the company four years ago to private equity firm Morgenthaler Ventures, said Vanderheiden. Two years ago, 100 people lost their jobs. Then there were rumors UAV was having financial problems.
Last Wednesday, the company told 170 people they would lose their jobs. Monday, state officials said UAV plans to eliminate 110 more positions. UAV wouldn’t comment.
“The new owners had no concept on how dynamic the business really is,” said Vanderheiden, who lost his job last week as regional manager in Phoenix. “Under Morgenthaler, it was all about them. And all they were interested in doing is, it felt like, bleeding the company dry and selling it.”
UAV’s job cuts follow the decision of Springs Global last week to lay off 760 people in Chester, S.C., and Fort Lawn, S.C., as the textile giant shifts its weaving operations to South America.
The two announcements dealt blows to a region already facing high unemployment. In May, unemployment rates of 6.9 percent in York County and 10.4 percent in Chester County soared above the national average of 4.6 percent.
Becky Richardson, commissioner of the S.C. Employment Security Commission, said state records show UAV employed 322 people last month with a $2.8 million payroll.
She said the company may have violated the WARN act when it laid off 170 employees in Fort Mill. Under the law, a company has to give a 60-day advance warning to workers of job cuts.
Richardson, a former state representative, said the Rock Hill branch of the ESC found out about UAV’s layoffs when the company’s former employees started filing unemployment claims. The Rock Hill office manager checked with the company and found that more workers would lose their jobs.
Source and more info: charlotte
The Air Force Research Laboratory has awarded a $7,996,471 contract to Raytheon Systems, Co., of El Segundo, Calif., for a surveillance sensor program. The two-year contract is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency of Arlington, Va., in support of its Integrated Sensor IS Structure, or ISIS, program.
ISIS envisions a stratospheric airship operating as a surveillance platform more than 70,000 feet above the Earth.
The goal of the ISIS program is to develop a stratospheric airship-based autonomous unmanned sensor with years of persistence in surveillance and tracking of air and ground targets. It will have the capability to track the most advanced cruise missiles at a distance in excess of 370 miles and dismounted enemy combatants on the ground nearly 200 miles away.
Achieving this goal will require the development of technologies that enable extremely large, lightweight phased-array radar antennas to be integrated into an airship platform, according to laboratory officials.
Source and more info: tmcnet
The Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International and the Program Executive Office for Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aviation hosted the 4th annual student competition for unmanned aerial vehicles Friday and Saturday at the Webster Field Annex, St. Inigoes, Md.
The competition events began Wednesday with a tour of Patuxent River, and event indoctrination that evening. Thursday, students gave oral presentations with static displays to two teams of judges. Teams were also judged on technical papers submitted two weeks before the competition. They had an opportunity for practice flights at Webster Field, but not before passing a system safety inspection. The flight competition was expanded to two days this year, due to the increased interest and participation.
The student teams, judges, staff and sponsors were met with near perfect weather for this year’s competition. The object for the flying portion of the competition was for an unmanned, radio controllable, aircraft to be launched and transition, or continue, to autonomous flight. It was then to navigate a specified course and use onboard payload sensors to locate and assess a series of man-made targets before returning to the launch point for landing. Each team was required to complete the task within 40 minutes.
The event concluded with an awards banquet Saturday evening in the JT Daugherty Center. Rear Adm. Tim Heely, Program Executive Officer for Strike Weapons and Unmanned Aviation, reminded the audience that Hurricane Katrina illustrated how useful UAVs can be, and that plans should be made to use them in such events. He told the students, “you are each contributing in your own way. These ideas you are having could take you forward…they are your great ideas, and we are all counting on you.”
Source and more info: dcmilitary
Frank Hofmann, IAOPA Representative to ICAO, called for measures to make Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) compatible with existing air traffic, ensuring equivalent or higher levels of safety. Hofmann said, “Integrating UAVs with manned aircraft creates significant risks that can only be mitigated by strict certification and operational standards designed to ensure safe operations.”
These remarks were made at an ICAO Exploratory Meeting on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles held at ICAO Montreal headquarters, 23 to 24 May 2006. The meeting brought together representatives of States, the UAV industry, and airspace user to discuss the role of ICAO in establishing standards and recommended practices for these new devices.
Major concerns raised by Hofmann at the meeting included:
* UAV certification standards must equal or exceed conventional aircraft standards
* The need for UAVs to reliably “see”-and-avoid manned aircraft, especially for the smaller, hard to see UAVs
* Airspace access must not be restricted to accommodate UAV operations
* Existing manned aircraft should not be required to add equipment to assist with UAV compatibility. Additionally, more than 100,000 aircraft have no electrical system that would support such a requirement.
Source and more info: shephard
DID’s Oct 2005 article “Four FCS UAV Sub-Contracts Awarded” noted that the Piasecki’s innovative Air Scout UAV would compete against DARPA’s OAV-II, under development by Aurora Flight Sciences’ team (GoldenEye UAVs), another team led by Honeywell International, and BAE Systems as a third contender. The final winner would equip company-sized units with a Class II UAV under the Future Combat Systems program, and are expected to be part of the program’s Phase II or Phase III spinouts.
DARPA recently began awarding incremental funding under a pair of Organic Air Vehicle-II contracts worth a total of $77.4 million. Who were the lucky two?
Small business qualifier Aurora Flight Sciences Corp. in Manassas, VA received a $5.7 million increment as part of a $38.3 million cost-plus-fixed-fee contract for the continued development and demonstration of the Organic Air Vehicle-II. Work will be performed in Manassas, VA and is expected to be complete by Feb. 19, 2009. This was a sole source contract initiated on Oct. 15, 2004 by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency in Arlington, VA (HR0011-05-C-0035).
Source and more info: defenseindustrydaily
Sagem Défense Sécurité (SAFRAN Group) has been carrying out flight trials in Finland for its Sperwer B tactical UAV since the beginning of June.
These trials are taking place at the Finnish company Robonic Ltd Oy’s brand new site, Robonic’s Arctic Test UAV Flight Centre (RATUFC) in Kemijarvi, of which Sagem Défense Sécurité is the first client
Upgrade of the Sperwer A (currently in service), the Sperwer B is capable of long-range performance, and as a result meets requirements identified in recent military operations.
The Sperwer B has benefited from the site’s large size, which is particularly well suited to its flight performance. Robonic Ltd’s MC2555LLR pneumatic catapult is used for the trials, with a Sagem Défense Sécurité ground station providing UAV flight control.
The use of the MC2555LLR for this test was a conclusion to a contract signed in October by the two companies to study its capability to launch the Sperwer B tactical UAV. Already tested for the launch of the Sperwer A, this catapult is the latest in the Robonic launcher series.
“The test series proves the capabilities Robonic has in providing a reliable platform to launch a UAV’s”, says Juha Moisio, managing director of Robonic Ltd Oy. “It also demonstrates our overall capabilities in understanding the complexities of the launch process, a very short, but demanding part of the flight of an UAV”.
Source and more info: shephard
Efforts are underway to help find jobs for the dozens of employees who were laid off without warning from UAV Corp.
The Rock Hill Workforce Center of the S.C. Employment Security Commission will host a job fair with as many as 80 employers Thursday, June 29, at the Baxter Hood Center at York Tech, according to area Director Annie Reid. The United Way of York County is also planning to set up a fair for all agencies that serve Fort Mill Township. That will be open to the public, not just former UAV workers, according to Marketing and Communications Director Beth Covington.
The date, time and place for the United Way event were still being worked out, Covington said.
UAV Corp., a manufacturer and distributor of movies and music based in the Carolina Commerce business park across the street from Baxter Village, laid off 171 workers last week and shut down its distribution center.
The head of UAV told the company’s remaining employees - about 110 of them - in an e-mail that their jobs were uncertain and he could not guarantee they would be compensated if they showed up this week. Many workers who showed up Monday left by the afternoon.
“If you choose to come in on Monday without having heard from UAV please understand that you may not be compensated in any way for your time - other than with my thanks,” Larry Nowak, UAV’s president and chief executive officer, wrote in the e-mail.
UAV is also facing a lawsuit brought by Rock n’ Roll legend Chuck Berry and Sybersound Record Inc., a company that produces CDs for use with karaoke machines. UAV is accused of failing to get licenses for some of the CD+G (the format used for karaoke CDs) recordings it manufactures and distributes. The licensing fees can run as high as $200,000 per album, and Sybersound accused UAV and others of piracy that gave them an unfair advantage.
Source and more info: fortmilltimes
Shadow Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (TUAS), designed and built by AAI Corporation, surpassed 100,000 flight hours during a June 2006 combat mission in support of U.S. forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), less than a year after reaching 50,000 hours in total flight operations.
The hours-of-operation milestone was recorded in the week of June 12 during a sortie flown by a U.S. Army unit supporting ground operations against terrorism in Iraq. Details of the flight were not released. The 50,000-hour mark was reached on August 9, 2005.
“Shadow systems have proven to be key surveillance and intelligence-gathering assets in support of U.S. Army and National Guard units in Iraq,” said Steve Reid, AAI’s vice president of unmanned aircraft systems. “For instance, achieving 50,000 flight hours over the last 10 months means that between seven and eight Shadow aircraft were in the air simultaneously, on average, during every hour, day and night of that entire stretch.”
“No other tactical unmanned aircraft system worldwide has sustained such a high combat operational tempo as Shadow systems have,” Reid added. “The dedicated soldiers operating the Shadow system and their commanders have not only embraced the value of unmanned aircraft on the battlefield but have been extremely innovative in their employment of the Shadow, driving operational hours higher than we ever imagined possible.”
Since being deployed to Iraq at the outset of military operations there in early 2003, Shadow systems have flown more than 19,000 sorties and more than 84,000 flight hours in support of U.S. and allied operations. Total hours include sorties in training and other deployments.
Source and more info: shephard
