Flying eyes

This was the first ever operational deployment of Royal Australian Navy UAVs, with four Insitu Scan Eagles and their operators aboard HMAS Newcastle during her recent mission to the Middle East.

During that time, the Scan Eagles flew more than 200 hours, either on their own or in conjunction with the ship’s MH-60R helicopter.

These simultaneous operations, termed manned-unmanned teaming, were another first for the Navy.

It would be nice to report that at least one of the vessels spotted by the Scan Eagle was found to be carrying large quantities of drugs or guns, as has occurred in interceptions by Australian ships in earlier Middle East deployments.

Although they did observe numerous vessels, Lieutenant Commander Ben Crowther, officer in charge of the Navy Unmanned Aerial Systems Unit (NUASU) said they produced none of the big drug busts in what was a relatively quiet patrol in that respect.

He said this first ever operational deployment was conducted under an operational evaluation plan to capture data and learn all the lessons the Navy needs for when it goes shopping for unmanned aerial systems under project SEA 129 Phase 5.

These will be emplaced first aboard proposed new Offshore Patrol Vessels (OPVs) and then major warships such as the DDGs, Future Frigates and Landing Helicopter Dock (LHD) ships.

The sole purpose of a UAV is to transport a sensor or sensors and provide data back to where it’s needed. Since the early days of unsteady low-res video, the pace of platform and sensor development has been frantic.

“The rate of progression is astounding. No sooner do I get used to what’s out there on the market and get comfortable with the sensors available, and then a whole new range comes out or they have miniaturised a manned aircraft sized radar which can now be carried on a S-100 and give you a range of 100 nautical miles. That stuff is happening monthly,” he said.

“It will almost certainly change the future of the Fleet Air Arm.”

That’s so much so that NUASU, initially stood up as the Navy UAS Development Unit with five personnel in 2013 and based at HMAS Albatross at Nowra, NSW, is set to be commissioned as a Navy squadron.

The Navy is a relative latecomer to modern UAS, although it has had long engagement with unmanned systems, starting with the Jindivik remote-controlled target aircraft back in October 1950.

Jindivik remained in service right up to 1998. There was also the experimental Turana (1971-79) and Kalkara (1998-2008).

The Australian Army started using UAVs in 2003 and subsequently flew Scan Eagle for 45,000 hours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Indeed, LCDR Crowther’s passion for UAS stems from his 2012 deployment to the Middle East as a staff officer to the Australian Taskforce 633 deputy commander. That was the year when seven Australian soldiers died in Afghanistan.

“It made sense to me that if we can get the robots to fight or do that dangerous stuff and save the lives of our soldiers as a result, then we don’t need to be sending notification teams out to our soldier’s families,” he said.

The US Navy took an early interest in UAS, signing a deal with Insitu, now a subsidiary of Boeing, in 2005 and now has extensive experience of operating Scan Eagle from ships.

“In mid-2012 we put up a case to the chief of navy that there should be a bit more of a deep dive into this,” LCDR Crowther said.

The Navy UAS Development Unit was stood up in early 2013 and Navy took over the Army’s Scan Eagle contract with Insitu Pacific.

“The intent early on was to establish a basic understanding of UAS operations, develop orders, instructions and procedures on how do we do this stuff safely,” he said.

“It was about making Navy an informed customer.”

“It was about making Navy an informed customer.”
LCDR Ben Crowther

Beyond surveillance, NUASU envisages a very diverse range of possible roles for the eventual capability.

For surface warfare, a UAV can partake in the actual targeting and subsequent damages assessment. For amphibious warfare, a UAV, perhaps operating from of the Canberra-class LHDs, could conduct pre-assault reconnaissance and provide overwatch of the landing force including special forces.

A UAV could also provide targeting for naval fire missions, observe and correct fires and conduct subsequent bomb damage assessment.

“A UAV could also provide targeting for naval fire missions.”

Then there’s reconnaissance for humanitarian and disaster relief operations, search and rescue and range clearance.

In maritime interdiction operations, a UAV can conduct discrete observation of the target vessel, especially on the blind side, away from the interdicting vessel.

But in order to learn the basics, NUASU initially operated a small quadcopter.

This is what’s termed a Tier 1 capability and these small UAVs may even end up in the Navy inventory to support boarding operations, conduct mast and hull inspections and even assist in man overboard incidents.

LCDR Crowther said their ultimate objective wasn’t to replace any of the manned capabilities.

“What we aim to do is supplement or complement them, enable them to be better at their job by taking some of the load, some of the lower priority or more dangerous stuff. We therefore support the much greater capability of the manned aircraft,” he said.

“MH-60R has the world’s best sensor suite on board. Clearly we can’t compete with that with a 22-kilogram drone.

“Our version of manned-unmanned teaming is concurrent tasking. We might put the MH-60R up, it does a sweep of the area, works out what the maritime operating picture is and then allocates the task to us. Then the MH-60R can go and do higher priority tasks or it might be out of fuel or crew endurance. We can provide persistent ISR capabilities.”

With the proliferation of small UAS across the community, there’s a perception that these are not much more than useful novelties.

LCDR Crowther said as they examined procedures and regulations, it became obvious that what they were operating was a core aviation product, which required that they be operated by trained personnel, subject to the same qualification and crew rest requirements as those flying Navy helicopters.

That ruled out cross-training of personnel on ships as their onboard watch duties are incompatible with aviation requirements.

The current UAS personnel model is a trained pilot, aviation warfare officer or aircrewma as mission commander and four others cross-trained as UAS remote pilots, mission payload operators and maintainers.

That could evolve, as work proceeds on how to best process data from advanced sensors and disseminate it through the fleet. Aboard HMAS Newcastle, the raw video feeds go into the ship’s combat management system (CMS) for assessment in the operations room.

“We are not sure if that’s the best way to do it. It might be that we need to alter our crew model to process radar and ESM data in the ground control station,” LCDR Crowther said.

“That would entail having a sensor operator like the backend guy in a Seahawk. A Seahawk is capable of processing all its own data and it just sends processed tracks back to the ship. At the moment we are very reliant on the ship and we just point the sensor in the right direction.”

To further develop their UAS capability, the Navy decided in mid-2015 to buy a pair of Scan Eagle systems outright, each with ground stations and four aircraft, making a total of eight, at an all up cost of $15 million.

It also started looking at UAS capable of carrying more complex and diverse sensors, such as radars and ESM (electronic support measures).

Two systems were tried out, the Schiebel S-100 rotary wing UAV and the Insitu Integrator fixed wing, the commercial variant of the RQ-21 Blackjack used by the US Navy and Marine Corps.

“It piqued our interest in rotary. We had been flying the Scan Eagle for a while and we had a pretty reasonable understanding of the strengths and weaknesses, limitations and operational capabilities and potential of those systems. But we had no understanding of what small rotary platforms might do, despite the fact that Navy does helicopters as our core aviation capability,” LCDR Crowther said.

Schiebel, an Austrian firm, won the ensuing tender for one system, with two aircraft, two ground stations and two years of support.

Their arrival has been delayed because of the Navy requirement that they be powered by less flammable JP5 fuel rather than avgas.

Delivery is expected around the end of this year.

Fixed wing and rotary wing UAS each have advantages and disadvantages.

Scan Eagle can stay aloft in excess of 12-hours, is efficient and covert. But it has a small payload of a single sensor package, albeit very good ones. That’s either the EO900 TV camera with 170-times optical zoom for daytime use or the MWIR2 IR system for day and night use.

The latest payload is Australian firm Sentient Vision Systems’ ViDAR (visual detection and ranging) which gives Scan Eagle a capability for broad area maritime surveillance.

That uses a secondary high resolution camera to scan 180 degrees along the aircraft path, overlaying its images with subsequent images to discern persistent pixel anomalies.

A distant small wooden boat would not be noticed by the standard camera but would be seen by ViDAR, which can cue it for a closer look by other sensors.

“It is a bit of a game changer for us. Clearly it’s subject to environmental conditions again because it works in the visual spectrum,” he said.

“On clear day it gets reliable hits beyond 15 nautical miles. Sentient says their analysis shows it increases search effectiveness of Scan Eagle about 80 times. That is mind blowing.”

However, for a small UAV (22-kilograms) Scan Eagle has a large ship deck footprint which can be challenging on small ships. It requires a pneumatic catapult to launch and skyhook, which catches the wing, to land. That amounts to around 2500-kilograms of infrastructure.

The Navy considered putting Scan Eagle on Armidale-class patrol boats but concluded the required launch and recovery equipment posed an unacceptable risk of adding to hull cracking problems.

The Schiebel S-100 is more complex and much bigger than Scan Eagle – it weighs 199 kilograms – but has around half the endurance. Being a helicopter, it has nil deck footprint beyond the requirement for a suitable clear area of deck space.

Further, it can carry a payload of up to 50-kilograms which could include multiple sensors. It even has sufficient power output to run a radar.

With all these new capabilities comes yet another challenge – integrating their product into onboard combat management systems.

For the Scan Eagle deployment aboard HMAS Newcastle, Thales performed the integration into the FFG’s Australian Distributed Architecture Combat System (ADACS).

In 2015 there was a demonstration of network integration into the Saab 9LV combat system so integration of UAS onto the Anzac frigates shouldn’t be too difficult.

It’s not just the Navy interested in UAS. In 2016, NUASU conducted a three-month trial deployment of six Scan Eagles to Christmas Island to find out just what was required to move, operate and support UAS operations far from home.

On Christmas Island, this capability was demonstrated to Australian Border Force officers.

“They wanted some sort of understanding of what a drone could offer,” he said.

During that deployment, NUASU also lost one of its aircraft through engine failure about two kilometres off the island. Although Scan Eagle has very good glide characteristics, the onboard computer decreed it couldn’t make it back to land, so it was turned into the wind and ditched.

“Sometime s they float, sometimes they don’t. This one didn’t,” he said.

“Sometimes they float, sometimes they don’t. This one didn’t.
LCDR Ben Crowther

It was thought this aircraft had vanished for good into very deep waters surrounding the island. But four months later LCDR Crowther took a call from a Christmas Island dive operator who inquired if he was missing an aircraft.

Turned out his dive boat had anchored over a reef and there, 21-metres down, was the missing Scan Eagle, which was duly returned to Nowra. Salt water and electronics don’t mix and so it’s now good only for display purposes.

One other has been lost, a testament to Murphy’s Law – if anything can go wrong it will – and its corollary, that this will surely occur during the VIP demonstration.

Mostly Scan Eagle recovery on the sky hook works fine but not this time.

Just before the rope, a gust of wind hit the aircraft, its autopilot didn’t have time to correct and it stalled and crashed, disassembling itself on the ground before the onlookers.