The US Coast Guard is training up UAS pilots in anticipation of Congress providing funding for its own aircraft. The skeleton of the service’s UAS programme is taking shape at the Aviation Training Centre, Mobile, Alabama.
The Coast Guard has trained three pilots, officers with manned flight experience to operate the MQ-9 Guardian, a variant of the Air Force’s Reaper. The service also trained two sensor operators, an AET and a maintenance warrant officer. AETs operate sensors as air crewmen on manned maritime patrol flights. Lt. Cmdr. Jeff Vajda, the service’s UAS platform manager, said that avionics electrical technicians appeared to be best-suited to work as sensor operators for land-based unmanned aircraft.
“It’s a fairly direct transfer of skill set from the manned to the unmanned aircraft,” Vajda said, “because really a lot of these sensors are flown on both the manned and unmanned aircraft. It seems that the avionics electrical technicians are best suited for this.” But it’s not time to think about switching ratings just yet — the programme is in its infancy, and there is no training pipeline. Coast Guardsmen who are interested in operating unmanned aircraft will have to wait until Congress provides money for the service to buy the systems.
“Because we are still in a pre-acquisition phase and we are not operating this wholesale in the Coast Guard yet, there is no real training,” Vajda said. “We are nowhere near a low-rate initial production or fielding of any sort. The key to moving forward is the funding.” The service’s UAS pilots began training with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which began operating unmanned aircraft in 2009, Vajda said.
For cutter-based unmanned systems, the Coast Guard is closely watching the Navy’s MQ-8 Fire Scout programme. Fire Scout is a ship-launched rotary wing unmanned aircraft in development at Naval Air Systems Command, Patuxent River, Md. “The Fire Scout seems to be the most capable in meeting our cutter-based requirement in terms of sensor payloads and endurance,” Vajda said. “There are some systems out there, especially for the cutter-based UAS, that require only one person to be the pilot and operate the sensors,” he said. “So it could be an officer pilot, but depending on where you are operating, it may not need to be.”
In testimony March 10 before the House Appropriations subcommittee on homeland security, Coast Guard Commandant Adm. Robert Papp told members that the service was delaying investment in unmanned systems as a “cost avoidance measure.” The service had expected to purchase unmanned craft to complement its national security cutter, a platform Papp told the committee was incomplete without them.
The Coast Guard’s limited budget — about $10 billion compared with the Navy Department’s proposed $160 billion for fiscal 2012 — doesn’t provide a lot of leeway for complex systems development. So the service is relying on partnerships with the Navy and CBP to build its capabilities.
Papp told the subcommittee that the service would rely on the Navy’s development of Fire Scout to make inroads toward getting the UAS capability on national security cutters. The Coast Guard is pursuing unmanned systems to augment its manned maritime patrol flights, which will soon be insufficient to meet the service’s needs, Vajda said.
“At some point in the near future — 2015 for land-based and 2025 for cutter-based — there’s a gap in our ability to provide the number of flight hours we’re supposed to provide every year,” Vajda said. “We are supposed to [reach a] specific level of maritime domain awareness with aviation. We measure that in terms of flight hours. [In the near future,] manned aviation can’t meet that demand. UAS is seen as the most effective means of filling that gap.”
Source: The Navy Times