The U.S. Army is participating in a U.S. Navy analysis of alternatives (AOA) to determine whether both services’ requirements for vertical-takeoff-and-landing (VTOL) unmanned aircraft can be met by a joint programme.
The Army has provided an addendum to the Navy-led study “to see if the need is for two separate programmes or a joint programme,” says Tim Owings, acting programme manager for Army UAS. The AOA is expected to take six months. The Army, meanwhile, will imminently release a request for information to find out what VTOL unmanned systems might be available.
The Boeing A160T Hummingbird and Lockheed Martin/Kaman K-Max, already being evaluated by the Navy Department for unmanned resupply of Marine Corps forward operating bases in Afghanistan, are among the candidates. The Northrop Grumman/Bell Fire-X is another.
“We are looking for near fixed-wing performance out of a vertical-lift platform,” Owings says, including more than 12 hr. endurance with a 1,000-lb. sensor payload. Unmanned cargo resupply is not part of the Army’s requirement at this time, he says. Owings says the acquisition strategy being proposed by the Army is to award two quick-reaction-capability (QRC) contacts for technology demonstrators that would be evaluated for a year before launching a VTOL UAS programme of record and down-selecting to one system for development and production.
While the programme of record gets underway, the Army is moving ahead to deploy three A160T unmanned helicopters carrying the BAE Systems Argus-IS wide-area airborne surveillance sensor developed for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
In addition to the Argus payload, which will downlink wide-area daylight imagery and 10 narrow-field-of-view video streams for different users, the A160s will carry a signals intelligence package for target geolocation.
One of Darpa’s A160 demonstrators and two owned by Special Operations Command have been transferred to the Army and upgraded. Flight testing will begin in the next two months, and deployment — “most likely to Afghanistan,” Owings says — is scheduled for the second quarter of 2012.
Source: Aviation Week