The fast-moving Eagle Eye will operate up to 100 miles from its launch ship, searching for suspicious vessels
By GLENN W. GOODMAN Jr., Special Correspondent
The U.S. Coast Guard foresees great benefits from the vertical takeoff-and-landing unmanned aerial vehicle (VUAV), the tiltrotor Eagle Eye, that it plans to procure as part of its Deepwater modernization program.
The first tiltrotor UAV to be used by any military, the Eagle Eye will be able to loiter three hours on-station at a location 100 nautical miles from its launch ship and return with a sufficient fuel reserve.
The Eagle Eye will extend the sensor reach of the Coast Guard’s future cutters and make more efficient use of its manned helicopters, greatly reducing the time they devote to ocean and port surveillance.
Coast Guard Capt. Matthew Sisson, the Deepwater aviation program manager, told Seapower, “We’re going to use the VUAV to increase our overall operational effectiveness and reduce our total operating costs. It will perform surveillance at up to 100 miles from the cutter to detect and identify suspicious vessels using its onboard sensors, and then we will direct other assets, such as a manned helicopter or long-range interceptor [a planned 11-meter rigid hull inflatable boat], to prosecute those targets that require closer inspection or boarding. The VUAV will cover all the miles and miles of surveillance that we’ve done with manned systems, which we’ve always known is an expensive way to do business.”
The Coast Guard anticipates giving approval later this year for Bell Helicopter Textron to begin assembling the first production prototype for delivery and initial flight testing in the fall of 2008. Initial deployment is planned in 2011.
Developed by Bell, the Eagle Eye will operate from the Coast Guard’s new Bertholf-class National Security Cutters, which are now being built, and its planned Offshore Patrol Cutters.
With its two 10-foot-diameter rotors in the vertical position, Eagle Eye can take off, hover and land like a manned helicopter within a confined area on a ship. By tilting its rotors 90 degrees forward to the horizontal position, the air vehicle can fly with the speed and range of a fixed-wing turboprop aircraft, akin to the much larger Marine Corps Bell-Boeing V-22 Osprey troop-transport aircraft to which it bears a superficial resemblance.
The Coast Guard’s 18-foot-long TR-916 Eagle Eye will cruise at 185 knots, compared with 100-110 knots for a helicopter, and will have a dash speed of 220 knots.
The 418-foot National Security Cutter and the 360-foot Offshore Patrol Cutter will carry two Eagle Eye air vehicles and their one-person ground control station and one armed Multimission Cutter Helicopter (MCH). The Coast Guard is refurbishing and modernizing its existing 95 Eurocopter HH-65 Dolphin helicopters to convert them to MCHs.
Eagle Eye will be able to fly low passes over targets of interest at night and in adverse weather without risking the lives of pilots. It will extend a cutter’s flight operations to 14.2 hours per day — flying one VUAV at a time — compared with four hours using a single HH-65 alone, Sisson said.
The Coast Guard estimates the Eagle Eye VUAV system will be able to search 19.5 million square miles per year per cutter with about 1,000 annual operating hours at a cost of about $1,000 per flight hour. In contrast, the current operating cost of an HH-65 is $6,253 per hour.
“The Eagle Eye’s speed advantage also is important when you think about radius of action,” Sisson said. “If we send an aircraft due south from the ship out to a radius of 100 nautical miles but then have a surface contact to the north that we’d like to have checked out, the transit time is what limits a lot of a helicopter’s effectiveness.
“Eagle Eye will be able to reach the extent of its operational radius quickly and won’t use up its loiter time in transit. In addition, its dash speed will allow it to check out a large number of targets of interest rapidly to find the typically small number that warrant a closer look.”
Bell Helicopter is a subcontractor to Lockheed Martin Systems and Sensors of Moorestown, N.J., a partner with Northrop Grumman in the joint venture Integrated Coast Guard Systems, which in 2002 won the multiyear Deepwater contract to modernize and replace aging Coast Guard ships and aircraft. Lockheed Martin selected Bell in 2003 to develop and produce the Eagle Eye to be the Deepwater program’s VUAV. The Eagle Eye passed its preliminary design review in January 2004 and its critical design review in January 2005.
The Eagle Eye’s design is based on Bell’s TR-911X demonstrator, which flew more than 90 hours from 1992-2000. It achieved a cruise speed of 200 knots and altitudes above 14,000 feet while carrying a 210-pound payload and made many successful automatic landings.
Jon Rudy, Bell’s director of unmanned programs business development, told Seapower that the Coast Guard’s requirements “grew the size of that design by about an eighth.”
Bell built another Eagle Eye demonstrator on its own, the 18-foot-long TR-918. It first flew last January but crashed on April 5 after an unexpected loss of engine power while hovering. The company’s accident investigation determined that the mishap was not the result of a design flaw, Rudy said.
“The Coast Guard’s TR-916 is an optimized design …,” he said, “while the TR-918 was another technology demonstration vehicle. We continue to work on the 916 to make it not only the best performing vehicle we can, but also a highly reliable design with redundant flight control and other systems that are easily maintainable.”
Bell will deliver 45 Eagle Eyes and 33 ground control stations to Lockheed Martin, which will then integrate the system into the Deepwater “system of systems.” In June, Bell selected Aurora Flight Sciences of Manassas, Va., to build the Eagle Eye airframes. Aurora produces a sizeable portion of the Air Force’s Global Hawk UAV airframe for Northrop Grumman.
The Eagle Eye’s sensor payload will consist of a nose-mounted Telephonics RDR-1700 X-band multimode radar and the Star Safire III, a 15-inch-diameter camera turret located under the front end of the air vehicle. Produced by FLIR Systems Inc. of Portland, Ore., the Star Safire III includes an infrared camera, an electro-optical color daylight zoom camera, an electro-optical color daylight spotter scope and either a laser illuminator or a laser rangefinder, or both.
The infrared camera features a large, advanced midwave 640 x 480 focal plane array detector that produces high-resolution thermal imagery. It has wide, medium, narrow and super narrow fields of view. The spotter scope, which has a haze penetration filter, matches the camera’s medium and super-narrow fields of view and also offers an ultra-narrow setting for extremely long range.
The payload operator can view the medium- or super-narrow field-of-view infrared and spotter imagery of the same scene side by side on a display screen, said Blaise Dagilaitis, FLIR Systems’ vice president for U.S. business development. The Star Safire III also features an advanced image processor with scene-matching software algorithms that can fuse or combine the infrared video with the spotter scope’s visible light imagery to help the operator pick out targets, he said.
The Eagle Eye has a single centerline-mounted engine in its mid-fuselage, the Pratt & Whitney 200-55 turboshaft. It is essentially the same engine used in Bell’s 427 light twin helicopter. The Eagle Eye will fly autonomously to preprogrammed waypoints and feature automatic launch and recovery, the latter from a 25-foot hover using Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Common Automatic Recovery System. The air vehicle also features a folding nose and tail to facilitate shipboard storage.
An additional advantage that Eagle Eye will offer, Sisson said, is that it will “interfere much less with the ship’s business” because of its long sorties and automatic launch and recovery.
“We have a limited number of people on our ships who can’t continually be taken off their other duties to go man the flight deck to launch and recover a manned helicopter,” he said.
