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US military wants help to build 'aircraft carriers in the sky'

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The US military has challenged industry to further the concept of 'aircraft carriers in the sky'

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency has put out a call for input on how to enable existing large aircraft to carry, launch and recover multiple unmanned air systems for a variety of missions.

Military air operations typically rely on large, manned aircraft, but such missions put these expensive assets – and their pilots – at risk. While small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can reduce or eliminate such risks, they lack the speed, range and endurance of larger aircraft.

These complementary traits suggest potential benefits in a blended approach – one in which larger aircraft would carry, launch and recover multiple small UAS. Such an approach could greatly extend the range of UAS operations, enhance overall safety, and cost-effectively enable groundbreaking capabilities for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) and other missions, said Darpa.

The Request for Information (http://go.usa.gov/AWpm) seeks technical, security and business insights addressing the feasibility of launching and recovering multiple small unmanned air systems from one or more types of existing large manned aircraft, such as C-130 transport planes.

Dan Patt, DARPA programme manager, said: “We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky’.

“We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new UAS designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.”

The new Request for Information must address three primary areas:

  1. System-level technologies and concepts that would enable low-cost reusable small UAS platforms and airborne launch and recovery systems that would require minimal modification of existing large aircraft types. This area includes modelling and simulation as well as feasibility analysis, including substantiating preliminary data if available.

  1. Potentially high-payoff operational concepts and mission applications for distributed airborne capabilities and architectures, as well as relative capability and affordability compared to conventional approaches (for example monolithic aircraft and payloads or missile-based approaches). DARPA hopes to leverage significant investments in the area of precision relative navigation, which seeks to enable extremely coordinated flight activities among aircraft, as well as recent and ongoing development of small payloads (100lb or less).

  1. Proposed plans for achieving full-system flight demonstrations within four years, to assist in planning for a potential future DARPA programme. DARPA is interested not only in what system functionality such plans could reasonably achieve within that timeframe, but also how to best demonstrate this functionality to potential users and transition partners. These notional plans should include rough order-of-magnitude (ROM) cost and schedule information, as well as interim risk reduction and demonstration events to evaluate programme progress and validate system feasibility and interim capabilities.

Responses are due 26 November 2014.

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