Auvsidailies

may be postponed until after late September. The USN and USMC have not published an estimate for total orders, but industry officials estimate a production run of 250 systems, with three to four vehicles likely for each system. As the USN/USMC has worked on drafting requirements for the contract since August 2007, at least a dozen different suppliers expressed interest. Since the request for proposals was issued in early June, four teams are known to have submitted bids and performed flying demonstrations. Those competitors are the AAI Aerosonde Mk 4.7, the Boeing/Insitu Integrator, the UAV Dynamics Storm and the Raytheon/Swift Engineering KillerBee-4. Flying demonstrations performed in late June and early July will not be scored in the source selection process. The requirement is to replace the Boeing/ Insitu-supplied ScanEagle, developed in the late 1990s to scout for tuna fishing boats in the North Atlantic but adapted for military service in Afghanistan and Iraq for the USMC starting in 2004. With five years of operational experience, the USN and USMC have issued requirements for an aircraft at least triple the size of the 38lb (18kg)Scan Eagle airframe. The services want an aircraft that can operate up to 2nm (4km)

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flightglobal.com/auvsi

from a either a land- or ship-based ground control station. The aircraft should provide at least 10h endurance, with up to 24h desired, providing full motion video throughout the flight. The current schedule calls for initial operational capability in fiscal year 2012, but the USN and USMC added a requirement to the

“The initial capabilities document for the MQ-X has already been completed”

COL ERIC MATHEWSON USAF UAS task force commander

request for proposals in early June that would allow a contract to propose delivering five systems by the third quarter of next year. The USAF has launched the first step in the process of finalising the requirements for the MQ-X programme, which is usually the prelude to launching an acquisition programme within two to three years. “We’ve already begun work – in fact, the initial capabilities document for the MQ-X has already been completed, and now it’s beginning its way through the process. That MQ-X is potentially going to be our testbed for these concepts and we’ll see how it goes,”

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COMPETITION

says Col Eric Mathewson, the USAF’s UAS task force commander. The USAF’s newly released UAS flight plan up to 2047 – the service’s centennial anniversary – lists several desired capabilities for the MQ-X aircraft. But the timelines for the programme remain in flux. “I think it’s a little too early to know when they’re going to show up, but the analysis of alternatives is going to begin and take roughly one year. So I think you can anticipate towards late summer or the end of the next calendar year that the analysis of alternatives will be complete,” Mathewson says. The USAF first disclosed plans for an MQ-X requirement in 2004 at the Unmanned, Unlimited conference sponsored by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in Chicago, Illinois. The MQ-X was named among three programmes being pursued by the Air Force Research Laboratory, with MQ-X believed to be a multirole strike platform. The USAF had planned to acquire an MQ-X aircraft in the near term that would share many capabilities of the current aircraft performing the role – namely the Predator/ Reaper series. It would be followed by a family of increasingly sophisticated aircraft designated MQ-Ma to MQ-Mb to MQ-Mc, with the ��

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icrobotics, Inc. 28 Research Drive, Suite G Hampton, Virginia 23666 +1-757-865-7728 Innovative Navigation and Controls www.microboticsinc.com

August 12 2009 | Flight Daily News | 15

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