By Geoff Fein
As Insitu rolled the 1,000th ScanEagle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) off its assembly line, the company was looking ahead to its bid for the Navy’s small tactical drone and looking to expand its reach into the UAV market, a company official said.
The Marine Corps has been using ScanEagle, a joint UAV effort between Insitu and Boeing [BA], in Iraq, and the platform is also deployed on about 20 Navy ships, Steve Sliwa, chief executive officer, Insitu, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.
ScanEagle is also being deployed by Australian and Canadian forces.
“We are over 180,000 [flight] hours and we are adding about 400 hours a day support around the world in about 19 different locations right now,” Sliwa said.
Unlike the Marine Corps, where contractors are providing operational service fro ScanEagle, the Australian and Canadian forces have undergone training to operate the system themselves, Sliwa added.
“In the case of the Australians and Canadians, we have actually trained up a large number of operators and we do it as a joint deployment. And as it turns out there are some ‘special forces’ in the U.S. government where they have trained ScanEagle operators and we support them to be successful, but they are primarily the operators,” he said.
One of the big milestones that has helped the ScanEagle program grow was when it went from a standard deployment model to a hub-and-spoke model, Sliwa added. Under this model, ScanEagle flies from a hub, out 60 to 90 minutes to another location where there is a ground station. The platform is handed off to that ground station and flown upward of 12 hours before heading back to the home/hub base, Sliwa said.
“Doing that in a small tactical UAV that is supporting brigades, battalions, even platoons, hasn’t really been done before and that’s really opened up the program quite a bit,” he said.
Insitu has added some new payload capability to ScanEagle, for example, by adding different network integrations to enable communications across various networks, Sliwa said.
The company got to the point where it was having trouble with all the growth options, so officials thought the best thing would be to do a jump in technology. “So listening to our customers, and knowing that STUAS was coming up soon, we tried to anticipate what the needs of all the customers were, and we came up with Integrator,” Sliwa said.
Integrator is Insitu’s next generation product for the Navy’s small tactical unmanned aerial system (STUAS) Tier II competition.
“It’s really the evolution of our ScanEagle system to deliver a wider range of payloads with a multi intelligence capability,” Bill Clark, vice president emerging programs, told Defense Daily in the same interview.
“It allows us to simultaneously carry both EO and IR sensors in our nose. We tie into that both an IR marker and a laser range finder for better accuracy to the target,” he said.
“We also have the flexibility to incorporate additional payloads as part of a wide variety of locations on the vehicle–a center line payload bay, an inboard wing location for pylon mounted payloads, and outboard locations on the wing to support network communications systems.”
The new payloads are all wrapped around a software system that provides open architecture (OA), Clark added. “The same set of standard communications ports and data ports are at each location, and the OA nature of the software allows for quick and easy integration of those payloads into the system.”
Integrator is seven feet longer in wingspan than ScanEagle, and a couple of feet in the overall length. Integrator is 95 pounds heavier than ScanEagle (40 pounds and 135 pounds respectively) and the payload capacity increases from seven pounds for ScanEagle up to 50 pounds for Integrator. “We are carrying significantly more payload. The idea there is we really don’t want to preclude day/night operations,” Clark said.
“Our sensor system in the front housing, the EOIR camera systems, allows for continuous day night coverage,” he added.
Endurance wise, it is similar to ScanEagle, Sliwa said, about 24 hours total mission capability. However he acknowledged it likely would be often sued in the 14 to 16 hour range.
Clark’s team also developed the next generation launch and recovery system for Integrator.
“That new system is interoperable with the existing ScanEagle systems, so in the future we will be launching both ScanEagle and Integrator from the same ground equipment as well as the command and control from our ground station,” Clark said.
Another accomplishment of Clark’s team was that even though Integrator is considerably heavier than ScanEagle, “they were able to make a next generation launcher that can handle both ScanEagle and Integrator, and that is actually smaller and lighter than what ScanEagle currently uses,” Sliwa added. “The whole system collapses to a very small footprint.”