By Ann Roosevelt
FORT WORTH, Texas—AAI Corp. [TXT] is moving quickly to retrofit improvements on their Shadow Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems (TUAS), a company official said.
Reliability improvements, a re-winging effort and fitting a laser designator for the fleet are all part of the work, Russ Walker, division vice president TUAS at AAI Corp., told Defense Daily at the Army Aviation Association of America annual conference here.
For example, a laser designator is being fielded, the first units have been trained, and it will be deployed this month or next, Walker said.
Other improvements concern reliability, the biggest one being a new electronic fuel injection engine and a new fuel system, he said.
The current Shadow system uses a carburetor and, like autos, the TUAS is going to electronic fuel injection.
“There’s less maintenance and it adapts to environmental conditions better, so you wind up with more robust propulsion,” he said.
The re-wing effort adds three feet per side on the wing, for a total of six more feet, moving from a 14-foot wingspan to 20 feet, he said.
“Because we have fuel in the wing, it adds three more hours to the duration of the aircraft,” Walker said.
Once the modified Shadow fuselage has the electronic fuel injection, the wing can be swapped out, taking off the standard wing and putting the re-wing on.
The company is also working on adding winglets to incorporate antennas, which will give two to three percent better endurance. The company is using its own funds to do this.
The company April 15 announced it had begun deliveries of the extended wing kit. The Army has ordered 100 of the kits for soldiers and Marines.
Another effort is to put a communications relay capability on the air vehicle. It will allow soldiers using the Single Channel Air to Ground Radio System (SINCGARS) and relay from ground to air to get 90-to-100 kilometers from a handheld radio.
With TUAS systems in the field, it will take a year or so to get to them all, Walker said. “Basically what we’re doing is catching, in most cases, the systems before they deploy–making changes and training the troops in what we call a pre-set activity.
The next generation Shadow is already in the works, he said. The company is using its own internal research and development funds to build and fly a prototype.
“It will be a larger and more capable air vehicle and it will have a heavy fuel engine,” he said. The new generation vehicle will also have more volume and flexible power for payloads.
“Our plan is to be able to carry multiple payloads, not just one,” Walker said. “The key is to do this improvement without sacrificing the tactical nature of Shadow.”
That means fitting into the same rolling stock and not increasing the footprint to keep the system tactical.
With a slightly larger wingspan and quite a bit larger in the fuselage, the Shadow launcher may require some modifications, he said.
One of the key drivers in this new generation or other change is to look at performance and cost, Walker said. For example, the current Shadow TUAS has a wooden frame and uses aviation grade plywood and fiberglass for the fuselage. Also, the propeller is made out of wood and coated to address environmental issues. “The reason we did that was cost trades,” he said. Wood, plywood and fiberglass do the job, The Shadow TUAS is flying round-the clock and has notched up nearly 500,000 total flight hours, the company said.