The Navy conducted a series of landings and approaches of the Fire Scout vertical takeoff unmanned aerial vehicle (VTUAV) in the most recent tests of the Unmanned Common Automatic Recovery System (UCAR), a Navy official said.
“We did a total of eight landings and seven approaches. The landings were repetitive to get the landing dispersion…how far away from dead center on the grid we wanted to be,” Capt. Tim Dunigan, Fire Scout program manager, told sister publication Defense Daily at the annual Navy League Sea Air Space expo in National Harbor, Md.
Additionally, the Navy conducted wave-offs to check the functionality of lost links and lost UCARS, Dunigan said.
“The aircraft performed exactly as we expected,” he said. “Like anything, you learn all the time you test fly; that’s why you go test fly.”
Northrop Grumman [NOC] builds Fire Scout.
The Navy is intending to deploy the VTUAV from the Littoral Combat Ship.
Dunigan noted there were some minor issues that cropped up that the crews worked through. For example, testers had trouble with one of the ground control station’s fans.`
The Navy has been testing Fire Scout at sea aboard the USS McInerney (FFG-8). However, those initial tests were cut short last month due to bad weather. The Navy then agreed to wrap up the tests in late April (Defense Daily, March 24).
The Navy will now begin dynamic interface testing–how the aircraft handles the wind around the super structure, Dunigan explained.
“That’s what’s going to go on for the majority of this week,” he said.
Then, depending upon how much of that testing gets completed, the Navy will go into mission-based scenarios. The Navy could also bring in an H-60 helicopter for those tests, Dunigan added.
“I don’t expect that to happen. I really just want to get the wind envelope cleared,” he said. “We want to start off with wind down the bow and we’ll probably vary the wind speed–the wind over deck–by driving faster into the wind.
Once that gets complete, the VTUAV will come back for the next run, but operators might do it 10 to 15 degrees to port, and that will cause the wind to come down on the starboard side, Dunigan added. “What we are looking at is how did that aircraft handle with that new wind condition?”
Program officials will hand off Fire Scout to the fleet, with ideas of how they think sailors are going to use it, Dunigan said. “And they are going to tell us how they are really going to use it.”
“And they’ll say ‘if you can do this, this, and this, that would be really neat,” he added. “So that’s the real reason we want to get it out now ahead of LCS. We want to learn those lessons today, so that when LCS is available [Fire Scout is] a much more mature and capable platform.”