Virginia Tech to get $2.6 million to test unmanned aircraft systems
In Virginia, the work and resulting economic impact will be distributed across the commonwealth, but focused in Blacksburg, Dahlgren, Wallops Island, and Blackstone and in regions such as Hampton Roads and Northern Virginia, with the largest concentration of aviation or related companies.
The partnership also helps answer the Federal Aviation Administration Modernization and Reform Act of 2012, which calls for the establishment of six unmanned aircraft system test sites. The sites are expected to be named this year.
“While being named a Federal Aviation Administration test site would provide a significant competitive advantage to the partnership, even without that designation, the team intends to remain intact to conduct unmanned aircraft systems research, development, and test and evaluation activities,” said Jon Greene, interim executive director of the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership and an associate director at Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science. “The partnership has already conducted test flights.”
Last week, the New Jersey Institute of Technology working American Aerospace Advisors Inc., both partnership members, examined the use of an unmanned aircraft system to assess damage and provide information that would be useful to emergency responders in a disaster — information that could speed decision-making and save lives.
Flight testing was at Warren Grove Gunnery Range, a New Jersey Air National Guard training site. The unmanned aircraft system demonstrated that it could be used to rapidly assess and map damage, information that can be relayed to command centers, Greene said. Such a tool would have been useful in the aftermath of a natural disaster such as Hurricane Sandy.
The partnership’s first flight was in October, when a team with the Virginia Center for Autonomous Systems, a research arm for the Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science, and the College of Engineering, examined an unmanned helicopter’s effectiveness at gathering data useful for managing crops.
Using equipment provided by American Aerospace Advisors that detects ultraviolet, visible, and infrared wavelengths, researchers simultaneously used four different cameras to provide visual data of the stress and health of crops of five acres of tobacco.
The team intends to continue working with farmers to improve agriculture efficiency and sees significant opportunity for higher yields, lower costs and reduced fertilizer and pesticide use.
“These were two wonderful opportunities for the Mid-Atlantic Aviation Partnership,” Greene said. “While Virginia Tech, American Aerospace Advisors Inc., New Jersey Institute of Technology, and other partnership team members have flown unmanned aircraft systems for thousands of hours, these two operations are the first ones in which we have operated under the partnership. It was a chance to validate our safety and operating procedures.”
Virginia Tech and the other partnership members say they believe the success of the partnership will bring economic development and high-tech jobs to the region.
“We recognize that there are legitimate concerns with drones,” Greene said. “Our job is to ensure that safety and privacy are protected as we move forward. I wish we had done that as a society as we adopted things like smart phones, global positioning systems, and social media. We see a huge upside to integrating unmanned aircraft systems into our economy if we do it the right way. Agriculture and disaster response are just two of the applications in which the aircraft systems are going to make huge contributions to our society.”
