DECEMBER 2017 AUSTRALIAN AVIATION 63FLYING EYES
aircraft, two ground stations and two
years of support.
Their arrival has been delayed
because of the Navy requirement that
they be powered by less flammable
JP5 fuel rather than avgas. Delivery is
expected around the end of this year.
Fixed-wing and rotary-wing
UAS each have advantages and
disadvantages.
ScanEagle can stay aloft in excess of
12 hours, is efficient and covert. But it
has a small payload of a single sensor
package, albeit very good ones. That’s
either the EO900 TV camera with
170-times optical zoom for daytime
use, or the MWIR2 IR system for day
and night use.
The latest payload is Australian
firm Sentient Vision Systems’ ViDAR
(visual detection and ranging) which
gives ScanEagle a capability for broad
area maritime surveillance.
That uses a secondary high
resolution camera to scan 180 degrees
along the aircraft path, overlaying its
images with subsequent images to
discern persistent pixel anomalies.
A distant small wooden boat would
not be noticed by the standard camera
but would be seen by ViDAR, which
can cue it for a closer look by other
sensors.
“It is a bit of a game changer for us.
Clearly it’s subject to environmental
conditions again because it works in
the visual spectrum,” LCDR Crowther
said.
“On a clear day it gets reliable hits
beyond 15 nautical miles. Sentient says
their analysis shows it increases search
effectiveness of ScanEagle about 80
times. That is mind blowing.”
However, for a small UAV
ScanEagle has a large ship deck
footprint which can be challenging on
small ships. It requires a pneumatic
catapult to launch, and a skyhook,
which catches the wing, to land.
That amounts to around 2,500kg of
infrastructure.
The Navy considered putting
ScanEagle on Armidale class patrol
boats but concluded the required
launch and recovery equipment posed
an unacceptable risk of adding to hull
cracking problems.
The Schiebel S-100 is more complex
and much bigger than ScanEagle – it
weighs 199kg – but has around half the
endurance. Being a helicopter, it has nil
deck footprint beyond the requirement
for a suitable clear area of deck space.
Further, it can carry a payload of up
to 50kg which could include multiple
sensors. It even has sufficient power
output to run a radar.
With all these new capabilities
comes yet another challenge –
integrating their product into onboard
combat management systems.
For the ScanEagle deployment
aboard HMAS Newcastle, Thales
performed the integration into
the FFG’s Australian Distributed
Architecture Combat System
(ADACS).
In 2015 there was a demonstration
of network integration into the Saab
9LV combat system so integration of
UASs onto the Anzac frigates shouldn’t
be too difficult.
It’s not just the Navy interested in
UAS. In 2016, NUASU conducted a
three-month trial deployment of six
ScanEagles to Christmas Island to find
out just what was required to move,
operate and support UAS operations far
from home.
On Christmas Island, this capability
was demonstrated to Australian BorderForce officers.
“They wanted some sort of
understanding of what a drone could
offer,” LCDR Crowther said.
During that deployment, NUASU
also lost one of its aircraft through
engine failure about two kilometres off
the island. Although ScanEagle has
very good glide characteristics, the
onboard computer decreed it couldn’t
make it back to land, so it was turned
into the wind and ditched.
“Sometimes they float, sometimes
they don’t. This one didn’t,” he said.
It was thought this aircraft had
vanished for good into very deep
waters surrounding the island. But
four months later LCDR Crowther
took a call from a Christmas Island
dive operator who inquired if he was
missing an aircraft.
Turned out his dive boat had
anchored over a reef and there,
21-metres down, was the missing
ScanEagle, which was duly returned
to Nowra. Salt water and electronics
don’t mix and so it’s now good only for
display purposes.
One other has been lost, a testament
to Murphy’s Law – if anything can go
wrong it will – and its corollary, that
this will surely occur during a VIP
demonstration.
Mostly ScanEagle recovery on the
skyhook works fine but not this time.
Just before the rope, a gust of wind
hit the aircraft, its autopilot didn’t
have time to correct and it stalled and
crashed, disassembling itself on the
ground before the onlookers.Sometimes
they float,
sometimes
they don’t.
This one
didn’t.
LCDR BEN CROWTHERNUASDU engineering
managerLCDR Matt Hyam
with an S-100 at the Avalon
Airshow earlier this year.
DEFENCECamcopter S-100s at Jervis Bay
Airfield during trials with NUASU
in 2015.DEFENCE