Land transportation and border securityAustralia to use UAVs to bolster border security

Australia’s Customs agency has unveiled an unmanned aircraft as the latest weapon to protect Australia’s borders. The plane, being trailed for six weeks in far north Queensland, is able to transmit live pictures back to a ground station at Weipa, and then onto the national surveillance center in Canberra. It is hoped the technology will boost Customs’ ability to detect illegal foreign fishing and any quarantine and border threats. Customs spokesman Nigel Perry says the camera system is very stable. “We can pick things up at very long range, look at what people are doing at long range,” he said. “The beauty of that is that if someone is doing something illegal we can actually stand off — they’ll never hear it, they’ll never even know it’s there.”

The aircraft has flown successfully over the Gulf of Carpentaria, the Torres Strait between Australia and Papua New Guinea, and the Great Barrier Reef during the trials. A report on the effectiveness of the technology will be prepared for the government when the trial ends next month. A spokesman for Home Affairs Minister Bob Debus said if the planes were put into service, one of their duties would be surveillance against illegal immigrants trying to reach Australia by boat. “UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) are quiet, virtually undetectable and can maintain extended surveillance of a target area or vessel for many hours at a time,” Debus said in a statement. “This trial will assess the suitability of UAVs to boost surveillance of critical offshore maritime areas, including the vital Torres Strait border region and the environmentally sensitive Great Barrier Reef.”

The aircraft under test is a Heron operated by Israel Aerospace Industries. It has a wingspan of 16.6 metres, is 8.5 metres long, and has a range of more than 1,800 kilometres.