Week #23 - Air Ops

Getting back to my roots, at least in the Reserves, this past week I was involved with flying our micro-UAV, or unmanned aerial vehicle. While "aerial vehicle" sounds contradictory, the acronym is universally used in the military. The most famous UAV is probably the Predator, which was first used in Operation Southern Watch and then used extensively during Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom. Entire land units have surrendered to the Predator!

The MSRON's deploy with several Wasp UAV's. They are very small and very light. Basically a paper airplane with a motor and a couple cameras. There is a base station with a transmitter, a controller, a laptop (for collecting video and images), and a hub that provides power and connects everything.


We had a team come up to the OPLATs last week and fly the Wasp from KAAOT, our boats, and the Cardigan Bay, the ship where our boats work out of. While it added quite a bit to my personal 'optempo' (operational tempo) it was still fun to be involved.

The first thing we did was fly it off one of our boats. It was a pretty good test of flying in low visibility. It was the 2nd day of a pretty bad sand storm. Even though the wind was gone and the seas had calmed back down, there was still a lot of sand and haze in the air. As you can see below, visibility was less than 100m.

Getting ready to launch

Lift-off and follow through

The Wasp has a return home mode. We had it fly in a straight line for about 7km before turning it around and having it return to base autonomously. As the UAV indicated it was flying overhead and evading detection, I asked how close the boat was to where we launched. 200m was the reply. Well, duh! Once we backed up to where we started, I saw the Wasp flying away from us. The pilot quickly took control and brought it around, ditching in the water just a few yards away. The aqua version is designed to land in the water, and we just plucked it out to use another day.

Can you see it?

The next day went well. We launched it from the northern end of KAAOT and did an altitude test and practiced landing it on the platform. We found the biggest open area to work from, hoping to catch it with a net we fashioned with the help of some scrap PVC pipe. Both landings the Wasp opted to hit the rusty diamond deck instead, but at least it is designed for that, as well. It just scuffs up the 'payload' underneath.


Unfortunately the next two days didn't go as well. The weather got rougher, and we lost two of our aircraft, one to signal interference and one to strong winds. On the first day we put two boats in the water to practice some "hand-offs" from the launch controller on KAAOT to a forward controller on the boat. We were pretty exited to try this out, but were disappointed when the bird lost comms and tried to fly back to the U.S. It got as far as the KAA, a little too far for us to go off and try to find it. We tried again in the afternoon, but ran into more system difficulties. The team returned to Cardigan Bay, licking their wounds.


We didn't have more luck the next, and final day. By then our Commodore was out to see the status of the testing. We tried once again to launch from KAAOT and have a boat take control. It worked, but they couldn't get the Wasp to come to the boat. So they passed control back to the platform. Which worked, except WE couldn't get the bird to come back. Then we realized the problem: It was so windy the Wasp was essentially flying backwards! Like a minnow trying to swim up a waterfall, our little bird was losing ground. When we realized our folly of trying to fight Mother Nature, we ditched the airplane, taking pictures along the way. The pictures include the latitude/longitude data. Lat/Long in hand, I ran the length of the platform back to the Ops Center and had them plot the coordinates: Several miles away again, up in the KAA. This time we dispatched the boat to go search. They 'dropped datum' in the form of their bright orange life ring and conducted a couple different types of searches. No luck. And they couldn't find the life ring, either!


In the afternoon, we decided to play it safe and just concentrate on doing some static displays and demonstrations in and around the Ops Center. One of the Iraqi Naval officers took some interest. Afterwards, we had the obligatory photo shoot of the team. I'm the strap-hanger in the back left.



This week's entry is a little short. I usually write on Sunday but that was the final day of UAV ops. Mondays I usually get online with Katie via Skype, but I was very busy yesterday, as well. So here it is Tuesday and I'm trying to finish this before our rescheduled call.