Three companies compete for a long-endurance UAV concept

When QinetiQ’s solar-powered Zephyr UAV entered the history books 28 July with a flight that lasted three and a half days over Arizona (see 28 August 2008 HS Daily Wire story), it added credibility to a quest by a number of companies and agencies to develop ultra-long endurance drones for reconnaissance or communications relay. Defensenews’s Jim Hodges writes that the idea of a UAV flying at altitudes as high as 90,000 feet for five continuous years no longer sound like science fiction, but it is only recently that such a notion has been taken seriously.

Derek Bye, who designs airplanes for Lockheed Martin, remembers the titter that ran through the audience when the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held an industry day in Arlington, Virginia, to announce Vulture, an unmanned plane which would fly for five years carrying a half-ton of payload and drawing just five kilowatts of power. There was “the giggle factor,” said Bye. Such an idea was not completely out of the blue. Seven years earlier, a strange-looking, unmanned solar-powered plane called Helios set an altitude record for propeller-driven craft of 96,863 feet. The California company AeroVironment built Helios for a NASA research effort into high-flying environmental sensing aircraft. The Helios flying wing eventually broke apart off Hawaii, but U.S. defense officials saw potential in the idea.

So DARPA came up with the Vulture program. In April the agency awarded $4 million design contracts to Boeing and Lockheed Martin, and to the specialty-UAV-company Aurora Flight Sciences. They will study competing Vulture designs under an initial twelve-month analytical effort. The winner or winners will advance to a second phase, in which they will attempt to keep a subscale aircraft aloft for three months. A third phase would extend that goal to a year.

A Vulture flying at 60,000 feet could produce a continuous high-resolution image of a battlefield within a 750-mile-diameter viewing footprint, which could take some of the pressure off traditional military UAVs. DARPA is open to other ideas about the uses for the craft and has asked the competitors to suggest some.

It is not unreasonable to think that such aircraft might eventually do some jobs now handled by satellites, but more cheaply, flexibly, repairably, and without creating orbiting space junk. “By choosing five years, DARPA is making us think beyond the airplane,” said Bob Parks, who is leading the design effort on Aurora’s Odysseus plane. If DARPA succeeds, people