Scion UAS, LLC has won a government contract worth up to $3 million to supply unmanned helicopters for unspecified uses.The company must deliver one such helicopter to the Naval Research Laboratory within six months, another three months later, with an option for a third, according to Scion co-founder Jim Sampson.
Scion was awarded the contract Sept. 28.
The Naval Research Lab’s request for proposals specifies what the helicopter should be able to do – such as take off from and land on a moving ship by itself, fly sideways into a 46-knot wind and carry at least a 90-pound payload.
“It will fly all by itself,” Sampson said. “The computer will fly it. We just tell it where to go.”
The military agency needs an aircraft versatile enough to carry the equipment that it’s testing, said Scion UAS director of software development Phillip Jones, but it isn’t saying what that equipment will be.
Scion UAS and Scion Aviation, the company it spun off from last year, employ about 10 people now, Jones said, although they would need to add workers and increase automation if they started producing helicopters in any numbers.
Sampson said there’s not enough time to hire people and train them to get the naval job finished. “There’s going to be a lot of late nights” with his current workforce, he said.
The six-month deadline also didn’t allow Scion to design a helicopter from the ground up, so the company bought a small kit-built craft from a Denver man and is reverse-engineering it.
The final version of the helicopter — named the Jackal — will be all new, though.
The Naval Research Lab job will pull the company a bit off its plan of having a smaller unmanned helicopter ready to sell in the first quarter of 2013, Jones said.
That craft, the Weasel, was to be the first product of Scion UAS, which was created to design and build such aircraft.
Sampson founded Scion Aviation in 1994 and had just about finished its new $2 million building just north of the Fort Collins-Loveland Municipal Airport when the 9/11 terrorist attacks hit.
The investors who were going to help Scion Aviation build a new two-seat helicopter didn’t want anything to do with aviation in the climate that followed 9/11, Jones said, so the company had to change its focus.
Using its equipment and expertise in carbon fiber component manufacturing, the company has been building prototypes and parts for the aviation and aerospace industries, Jones said.
Then in 2011, responding to a growing demand for small unmanned helicopters, Sampson and his wife, Betsy, Jones and two other founding partners formed Scion UAS.
The Weasel will have a wide range of uses, Jones said. “It’s a pickup truck of helicopters.
“There’s a lot of interest in it, but no sales yet,” he said.
It will fit in the back of a pickup, can stay in the air about four hours and should be able to hit 100 knots, Jones said. Target price: $350,000, not counting the ground station or payload.
He said port authorities have shown interest in using the craft to carry remote sensing devices out to sea to meet cargo ships, scanning them for chemical or radiation hazards before they ever get to port.
Other possible uses include search and rescue, forest fire reconnaissance, mine company aerial surveys and Border Patrol activities.
Sampson said he even can envision a Weasel fitted with automatic 12-gauge shotguns shooting down other unmanned aircraft.
Current Federal Aviation Administration rules prohibit civilian use of unmanned aircraft without special exceptions, but Congress has mandated new regulations by 2015.
“That’ll open up the domestic market for commercial applications. At the moment we can try to sell to the military because the military can control its own airspace,” Jones said.
The city of Loveland’s technology transfer initiative had a role in Scion’s winning of the contract.
Consultant David Lung worked with Scion to refine its proposal in the final stages, Jones said.
Source: Reporter Herald