Unmanned aircraft reach milestone

By C. Todd Lopez
ARNEWS

WASHINGTON — The Army recognized a milestone of 1 million hours of flight for unmanned aerial systems May 25 at the Pentagon.

Several UAS vehicles were on display in the courtyard of the Pentagon to officially mark the event. Those vehicles included the MQ-1C Extended Range Multi-Purpose UAS, the RQ-7B Shadow, and the RQ-11B Raven.

According to the Army Unmanned Aircraft Systems Project Office, Army UAS actually surpassed one million flight hours April 14. Of those hours, 88 percent were flown in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the project office, the RQ-7B Shadow flew nearly half of those hours, with 478,350 hours to its credit.

Colonel Gregory B. Gonzalez, the project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, said that since the Army began really experimenting with UAS, a lot has changed.

“Acceptance of unmanned aircraft systems was not immediate,” he said. “Upon their introduction into the Army inventory, unmanned aircraft were met with some levels of skepticism and doubt. But after initial inefficiencies were overcome and improvements were made, these doubts turned to acceptance.”

Today, Gonzalez said, there is increased demand for those UAS, and the Army flies more than 220,000 unmanned aircraft hours each year.

“Each hour represents not just time, but time well spent,” Gonzalez said. “Perhaps, most importantly, UAS flight hours (are) time well spent keeping Soldiers safe, finding and killing our enemies and collecting information that will lead to future successes.”

Chief Warrant Officer Anne M. Thrush said UAS employment in the Army has gone from an obscure military unit operating an unmanned system where operating units didn’t “understand how to use the information or process the information that was being provided to them,” to a battlefield today, where “commanders incorporate UAS from beginning to end in their operations...”

Tim Owings, the deputy project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, said he believes the future of Army UAS is secure.

“Because they have been so well integrated into the Army, I cannot imagine the Army going to fight without these systems ever again,” Owings said.

The future of Army unmanned aviation includes developments such as high-definition cameras and signals intelligence packages.

“There’s really no shortage of ideas ... of what we can do with the Sky Warrior system or any of the other systems, in terms of where we are going to go with them,” Owings said.

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