The US Army has decided to shut down its first-ever effort to fly unmanned aircraft using just ground-based radar because the endeavor was taking up needed resources without providing enough benefits, according to an official leading the programme.
The flights at El Mirage flight operations facility in California — the first tests that did not use a chase plane or visual observer of some kind — were halted after just 11.25 hours of flight time in April due to a glitch. In the months since, programme officials had maintained the glitch was fixed, and the plan was to resume flights.
But as the Army and the Federal Aviation Administration were agreeing on the manner in which to resume flights, the Army leadership elected to suspend the flights using the prototype ground-based sense-and-avoid system, said Viva Austin, the Army’s product director for unmanned systems airspace integration concepts.
“Basically our leadership said, ‘Hey guys, this is just a piece of your plan, your path forward, and right now you’re spending a lot of resources and a lot of time on this effort, and it’s not buying you anything in the big game,'” Austin said in a Dec. 7 interview. Prior to the recent decision to halt the effort, the Army had agreed with the FAA to resume flights using a visual observer, she said.
Army leadership wanted to divert efforts to accelerate the continental U.S. fielding schedule of Gray Eagle drones, which will use a similar but more complex system in the national airspace, Austin said, noting the leadership decided to “cut our losses.”
Col. Timothy Baxter, Army Unmanned Aircraft Systems project manager, decided earlier this fall to shut down El Mirage, Austin said. Baxter told Dyke Weatherington, the Pentagon’s deputy director of unmanned warfare, of the plan in an Oct. 31 letter and asked him to inform the FAA, Austin said.
The Office of the Secretary of Defense deferred comments about the effort to the Army.
Baxter also asked Austin to create a plan to move forward, which was submitted last Friday during a management review. This submission finalized the plans to end the work at El Mirage.
Austin said the submitted plan calls for accelerating Gray Eagle fielding. These aircraft are stationed at Army airfields just outside of restricted airspace and need ground-based, sense-and-avoid capabilities to support them. The Army plans to move most of its testing and training out to Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to help with the acceleration, Austin said.
The plan was put these Gray Eagle systems in place in the fiscal year 2014-2015 time frame, but now the Army is going to work to do this faster.
“What we’re going to do is use the algorithms and displays, virtually the concept we developed for El Mirage, and we’re going to go back and certify all of the software” and build tunnels into the restricted airspace, Austin said. “And so what we developed for El Mirage will be what we put in place in an accelerated version until we get the more complex version out in 14-15.” She noted that this was a very exciting time for the Army.
The plan submitted last week also considered testing the ground-based, sense-and-avoid capability in theater. Austin this possibility is tough in the current fiscal environment because it is costly although important. “It’s one of those things, everybody is getting cut, and we’re not at the top of the most important list,” Austin said. She does not have a time line as to when a decision might get made on moving the system to theater.
In August 2010, the FAA initially approved the Army’s certificate of authorization (COA) to fly the planes at El Mirage during the nighttime. After a dispute between the FAA and the Pentagon over what data should be collected resulted in a memorandum of agreement, the FAA reissued the year-long COA on March 17. The first flight took off April 26 at midnight. But a glitch in the form of a self-check of the alert system grounded the system three days later. An FAA furlough that caused a partial shutdown also affected the Army’s ability to resume flights.
The effort to fly at El Mirage without using a visual observer was watched by others in the Defense Department, but at press time (Dec. 7) the other services had no comment on the impact of the Army’s decision.
Austin said the work done at El Mirage has enabled the Army to reach out and help the other services engage in similar efforts. She said the Marine Corps at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, NC, are looking at a similar COA. In addition, the Air Force requested this week a sit down with the Army to talk about putting together a safety case for a base, Austin said.
Austin noted the prototype at El Mirage also allowed the Army to work with the FAA and to demonstrate its system worked.
“We’re focusing more on the next steps,” Austin said. “And it’s unfortunate because the prototype was kind of a baby to us. It was the first one that was ever out there and it was a really good news story, but the reason we shut it down was really just because it was really time consuming and wasn’t buying us anything anymore.”
Although flights halted shortly after they started, the Army continued to run the radar and collect data on the airspace. No problems had been found with the system since the glitch in April.
Source Inside Defense