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 23 May 2012 - 7:50 by Tony Skinner in Gold Coast Heli-Pacific 2012:

Schiebel S-100 crash due to loss of GPS The 10 May crash of a Schiebel S-100 UAV in the South Korean port city of Incheon, which killed an engineer, was caused by a loss of GPS, the company has confirmed. The engineer was killed and two others injured when the S-100 crashed into their ground control station during tests for the South Korean military. Speaking at the Heli-Pacific conference in Queensland, Australia on 23 May, Neil Hunter, Schiebel managing director, confirmed it was a loss of GPS that helped create the conditions for the crash. While local media reports have suggested that the South Korean military is now investigating whether the jamming of GPS signals by North Korea could have caused the crash, Hunter did not speculate on the loss of GPS. ‘What happened was extremely tragic and should never have happened. But it did and not only Schiebel but the wider industry must learn their lessons from that,’ Hunter said. ‘The only thing I can say is there is an investigation under way. The initial investigation proved the fact the system lost its GPS – we don’t know why it lost its GPS other than the only time we have seen it lose GPS is when it is jammed but I can’t go any deeper than that statement.’ Hunter noted that there were procedures for when the GPS signal is lost but suggested that human error may have contributed to the crash. ‘The aircraft did everything that it should have done and was expected of it but unfortunately what appears to have happened is human and a number of mistakes have piled up like a bunch of dominos and caused the eventual effect.’ In his presentation to the conference, Hunter highlighted the excellent safety record of the S-100 but conceded that for many the safety case of employing UAVs for many tasks had still to be proven. ‘Any crash that happens in the UAV world gets the sceptics shouting louder saying these things are not safe, they shouldn’t be allowed to fly anywhere that sort of thing. But what actually happened was a chance in a billion to hit the ground control station – it was flying in regulated airspace, it was flying in a very clean area. So everything was done exactly as it should have been. ‘But any crash affects the UAV world as it tries to prove the safety case. Our system has an extremely good safety record and this is the first time we have had something like this and it is very unfortunate.’

Its seems like there are game changers almost daily at the minute, this new airframe from ZALA is good for 1000km of mapping at a time. The post production work on that would take days. Great for parts of the world where flight regulations are not a worry. UAS ZALA 421-16 launched in 2009 currently service with a number of government agencies has been modified by ZALA AERO GROUP for civil sector use. Energy and land management sectors are especially targeted with routine cost-effective solution for large scale aerial photography that can cover over 1000km in one flight. The latest upgrade to UAS ZALA 421-16 includes a dual-frequency GPS/Glonass receiver TRE-G3T with frequencies L1 and L2 supporting RTK increasing the accuracy of the aerial photography coordinates to centimeters. To increase data output UAS has been additionally equipped with two high-resolution professional photo cameras which make it possible to obtain 3D images with accurate coordinates embedded. ZALA 421-16 interchangeable power plants have not been modified as the two-stroke and four-stroke engines offer a selection to the end user depending on different missions’ characteristics. The aircraft modification has been in development for the five months confirming its abilities to function in a wide range of harsh environments and as all other ZALA AERO GROUP UAVs is adapted for a temperature range of -30⁰C… 50⁰. ZALA 421-16 Characteristics Range 520 km / 1040 km Flight endurance 4 hrs ; 8 hrs Wing span 1,62 m Ceiling 3000 m Take-off/Landing Catapult/Parachute Power plant 2 or 4 stroke engine Speed 130-200 km/h Take-off weight 16 kg Navigation GPS/Glonass Photo Two built in 21Mpx payloads

 The Pentagon has a big command-and-control problem. Not insubordination among the troops. It’s that unmanned systems for land, air and sea—for which the military spent $6 billion-plus last year—can’t “talk” to one another. Every UAS contractor builds proprietary control systems, making it impossible to integrate different machines or for the military to tinker with existing systems. “It can only be described as byzantine,” says retired Lieutenant General Dave Deptula, once the Air Force’s First Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance, and thus in charge of UAS that have been deployed to devastating effect in Afghanistan, Iraq and Yemen. That’s great for UAS builders. The unique software codes and operating features lock the Pentagon into an exclusive and expensive relationship. Nelson Paez is trying to break that lock. His company, DreamHammer, has spent $5 million building an operating system, Ballista, that can link and control any kind of UAS or robot, armed or unarmed. If the military adopts it, manufacturers like Northrop Grumman and Boeing would have to license Paez’s software so their unmanned systems could be plugged into the military’s. “We’ve been working with the government for the past three years on this,” says Paez, a tall Californian who, Men in Black-style, sports wraparound sunglasses and a dark suit. “When I first told Defense officials about Ballista, they stood up and said, ‘That’s what we’ve been waiting for for years.’” Ballista’s system is so simple it can be run from a tablet. The software interfaces with an unmanned aircraft via an application programming interface, a.k.a. API. Each aircraft’s unique software codes, operational hardware protocols and data transmissions flow into Ballista’s central command system to be translated and displayed in a video­game-like user interface. The system streams thermal imaging information from cameras, geo-locating data and flying controls for surveillance drones—and serves as a trigger for armed ones. UAS that can’t now be networked could then communicate with one another. DreamHammer CTO Chris Diebner compares it with a smartphone OS—on which UAS and features for them can be run like apps. Of course, Ballista is doing something on a much larger scale. It means that it takes fewer people to fly more UAS and that new features can be rolled out without the need to develop and build a new version of a Predator, for example. Now 38, Paez spent the late 1990s doing IT security work for the Defense Logistics Agency. He cofounded Dream-Hammer in 2000 to provide identity management systems and IT security to companies like Country Financial, Pfizer and Best Buy. Today it’s a 75-person shop out of Santa Monica, Calif., Honolulu and Arlington, Va. doing only government work. It has a current backlog of $23 million in U.S. contracts and netted 15% on revenue of $6.9 million last year. In 2008, with talk of in-sourcing jobs and military budget cuts, Paez pondered new opportunities. He asked Pentagon contacts about their biggest challenges— and responded with an open architecture for robot operations. Into Ballista went a total $2.5 million of reinvested profits, $1 million from angel investors—and the brainpower of engineers recruited from the likes of Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Atomics. Now in beta, Ballista is being tested by military labs paying $1.5 million to do so. DreamHammer plans to release the product in 2013, along with software development kits so drone contractors can develop “apps” on the Ballista system. Paez is seeking $20 million in funding for the next phase: commercial applications. Congress ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to allow for private drones in the national airspace by 2015. That puts companies like FedEx and UPS on DreamHammer’s radar. Images from DreamHammer Source: Forbes

 Posted on May 24, 2012 by The Editor

Last weekend, when NATO leaders met in Chicago, they unveiled a series of new projects, among them, apparently, a programme to develop and expand the use of unmanned aircraft to confront the security threats of the future and make better use of tighter budgets. Used first for surveillance, and increasingly for strikes, UAS have considerable operational attraction. But killing with these stealth weapons stretches legal boundaries to the breaking point, and alienates people in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen, countries in which neither NATO nor the United States, its most powerful member, are actually fighting wars — unless the “war on terror” has opened the entire world as a battlefield. NATO’s attraction to UAS, almost exclusively US-built at the moment, is understandable. They are relatively cheap, can be deployed quickly in inhospitable terrain over vast distances and help keep troops and airmen out of harm’s way. But this push-button solution to warfare poses very real risks to civilians, especially as targeting criteria deteriorate to the point where a special rapporteur to the United Nations has described them as a “vaguely defined licence to kill.” The rules for using strike UAS should be clarified, and the tests that determine who is a legitimate target should be explicit. The standards NATO sets and its respect for international law will stand as a powerful example to all, especially as other governments seek to expand their production and use of UAS. Operations are conducted in isolated areas under the utmost secrecy, making it virtually impossible to determine who has been killed or injured and whether the strike complied with the laws of war. Recent studies estimate one civilian dies for every four to five suspects killed. While these strikes are described as clinical and surgical, there is no independent way for the public in NATO countries to evaluate the extent of their impact on civilians. It may well be the requirement of proportionality in the laws of war — that civilian casualties not be disproportionate to the legitimate military objective of the operation — is satisfied in a given operation. But this cannot be taken for granted, particularly if these supposedly precision operations result in one civilian killed for every five combatants. As NATO countries prepare to withdraw thousands of troops from Afghanistan and expand their UAS programs commensurately, they must carefully weigh the policies and practices for using a weapon that distances them from the human, political, legal, and moral costs of war. Source: Winnipeg Free Press