On a chilly July morning Greg Walker sits in front of a powerful computer, a joystick in his hand. But he’s not playing video games. And instead of an imaginary battlefield or race course, his screen shows live, aerial video of our own location, a cluster of vehicles and tents on a hilltop 35 miles southeast of Fairbanks.

 

Walker is demonstrating the capabilities of an InSitu A-20 unmanned aircraft system (UAS) now circling about 1,000 feet above his camp. The aircraft under his control belongs to the Poker Flat Research Range, operated by the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Walker serves as range manager at Poker Flats, which recently acquired the A-20 to test new applications for a technology that so far has received mostly military use. The A-20 and its predecessors have amassed more than 40,000 hours of combat flying in the Middle East, according to InSitu.

 

Poker Flat plans on testing a wide range of potential uses for the UAS, Walker says. On this particular project, the aircraft is being used to map vegetation on the Stuart Creek Impact Area, an Army bombing range managed by Fort Wainwright.

 

The Army wants to assess the vegetation on the range so that it can better manage fires in the area, according to Fort Wainwright natural resources coordinator Jeremy Douse. Unexploded ordnance makes ground-based mapping of forest fuels too dangerous, he says. “We’re trying to map fuels in an area where you can’t really walk.”  

 

InSitu representative Martin Susser (right) controls the A-20's video camera while Greg Walker (left) checks the aircraft's position.

On this slightly hazy morning the UAS has been programmed to fly back and forth in straight lines as it collects video images of the forest beneath it. Although the aircraft is capable of flying itself, Walker and fellow Poker Flat researcher Don Hampton hover by the control station in case there’s any need to assume manual control of the UAS. Both men have had attended special training in operating UASs.

 

Cruising over the wooded valleys and ridges of the bombing range, the UAS transmits video images to the ground station, where they are stored on a computer. Later, computers will be used to sample select images from the video feed and combine them into a map distinguishing different types of vegetation.

 

- - - - -

 

Several features make the A-20 a promising tool for natural resource work like the Stuart Creek mapping project. With its roughly 40-pound weight and 10-foot wingspan, the A-20 is small enough to be easily transportable but big enough to support a variety of cameras and sensors. Better yet, the A-20 doesn’t need a runway—it’s launched from a hydraulic catapult and retrieved with a rope suspended from a collapsible tower.

 

The Poker Flat UAS is already attracting attention from several federal agencies in Alaska, among them the BLM’s Alaska Fire Service.

 

Sean Triplett, a geographic information systems specialist with AFS, is assisting Walker with the logistics and airspace coordination for this project, with an eye toward checking out the UAS’s possible use in wildland fire-fighting.  

 

“This is a nice, controlled environment for checking this stuff out before using it on an [fire-fighting] incident,” he says.

 

In addition to mapping fire perimeters, Triplett says the UAS could possibly identify hot spots in a fire using infrared cameras or even serve as a mobile radio repeater, improving communication between firefighters on the ground. UASs might also monitor fire activity in areas not under active suppression, freeing other aircraft from this task, he says.

 

The A-20 is launched from a hydraulic catapult.

Before that can happen, Walker and his colleagues need to tackle several challenges, including learning how to operate the UAS safely around other aircraft. Current FAA rules require closing airspace to all other aircraft before a UAS may be launched. That step was easier for the Stuart Creek project because of its location on military land. Elsewhere in Alaska, closing airspace could potentially cause great inconvenience to civilian and military aviation. 

 

Flying near UASs concerns pilots partly because they can’t talk to the aircraft. UASs can also be hard for pilots to see. Today’s exercise includes a test that readily demonstrates the latter problem. An Alaska Fire Service airplane arrives from Fairbanks and begins flying around the site at a safe elevation above the circling UAS. Its goal—locate the airborne A-20 from the air. Despite radio directions from ground observers, it takes about 10 minutes for the pilot and passenger to spot the A-20’s fluorescent orange wings beneath them.

 

Walker plans to make the Poker Flats UAS easier for aircraft to locate by outfitting it with a transponder, an electronic device that aircraft use to help identify themselves on radar and on other aircraft’s collision avoidance systems. Today’s test showed that effective radio communication between ground controllers and other aircraft will also be essential. Other safety concerns may be worked out as the various agencies that regulate aircraft develop protocols for UASs and gain more experience in their use.