Marines from Cherry Point, N.C., visit NAS Patuxent River, Md., to train with the Ground Based Sense and Avoid System, a new computer system designed to safely integrate unmanned aircraft in civilian airspace.
Kris Melton: Today we are here to train the Marines out at Cherry Point on their ground base sense and avoidance system.
Martin-Nims: It’s a system designed to safely integrate unmanned aircraft with civilian traffic for a very short amount of time.
Kevin Warren: The ultimate goal for the GBSA system and this training is to allow them to fly from their home base at Cherry Point over into the restricted area. This is going to save us money, resources and time, and it’s going to allow them to train much more efficiently to be able to fight their future wars.
Kris Melton: So what this laboratory has done is to create an entire airspace environment, virtual airspace environment to test in a real life scenario. We create aircraft tracks that are similar to what you would see out at Cherry Point. We fly entire missions and stress the airspace environment while they are flying.
Martin-Nims: Simulation has always been proven to take a user and apply stresses that are very realistic. The ability to simulate stresses that are almost unusual or worst case scenarios gets you a better trained operator and a safer system.
Kris Melton: The important part about this facility is everything we do here can be repeated over and over. So if we find issues in our scenarios or in their training or in the system itself, we can repeat that scenario over and over until we fix the problems or fix the training gap that we see.
Martin-Nims: Having a place like this allows to run the scenarios that are truly unlikely. Now you have a guy who is experienced and can run the system and if the worst case does happen he seen it once or twice and is now able to operate safely. It also paves the way for the future of unmanned aircraft ops and its ability to integrate with civilian aviation.
Kevin Warren: Once we at Cherry Point actually have access to airspace and we fly safely in that airspace i think you will see the access for UAS in general start to increase. But you have to do it slow, you have to do it measured and you have to do it safely and the folks at Cherry Point are prepared to do that.Source:US Navy Naval Air Systems Command