This summer’s visit from the unmanned, solar-powered mother of Helios Prototype, the Pathfinder Plus, is strictly commercial. There are perhaps 100 different types of uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) designs, many with specific military applications, according to Alan Brown of the
This summer’s visit from the unmanned, solar-powered mother of Helios Prototype, the Pathfinder Plus, is strictly commercial.
There are perhaps 100 different types of uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) designs, many with specific military applications, according to Alan Brown of the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center in Edwards, Calif.
The Pathfinder Plus, developed by the people who brought Helios to Kauai last summer, AeroVironment, is built solely for commercial applications. And the clock is running on the company in search of telecommunications and other customers to prove its millions of dollars in developmental research over the better part of a decade have been worthwhile.
“If they (AeroVironment) cannot exploit commercial usages, why do it?” Brown said.
And NASA, which Brown is quick to point out supports these types of research projects for civilian applications only, has provided seed money to AeroVironment to help prove that Pathfinder-Plus can be commercially viable.
Pathfinder Plus, which flew test missions over the U.S. Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility at Barking Sands in the summer of 1998, is the first such vehicle developed purely for commercial applications.
Scheduled to be shipped to the island in April, with ground crew to follow shortly thereafter, Pathfinder Plus already has three Kaua’i missions scheduled this year, including hovering above Kaua’i Coffee Company fields on the west and south sides of the island just before the fall harvest (see below), taking pictures to be used to calculate optimum harvest time for each field.
In news-release lingo, NASA and commercial researchers are planning the missions to confirm the practical utility of high-flying, remotely piloted, environmentally friendly solar aircraft.
This summer’s first two operations, co-sponsored by AeroVironment and their telecommunications customers, are tentatively scheduled for mid- to late June.
AeroVironment, Inc., developer of the solar-electric flying wings, believes the aircraft are uniquely suited as airborne platforms for commercial telecommunications relay services.
“The first planned telecommunications demo is a third-generation mobile application providing two-way data rates of up to 384 kilobytes per second to a mobile user on the ground, suitable for video transmission to a handheld device, as well as for other voice and data transmissions including Internet access,” said Stuart Hindle, vice president of strategy and business development for AeroVironment subsidiary SkyTower, Inc.
“The second demo is a digital high definition television application providing a picture-perfect video broadcast signal to a receiver on the ground at twice the resolution of conventional broadcast transmissions,” said Hindle
For the telecom applications, the Pathfinder Plus and its on-board transceiver, flying above the weather at 60,000 feet, would act like an 11-mile tall tower in the sky, doing the function of a geostationary satellite but without the time delay.
According to AeroVironment/ SkyTower Chief Executive Officer Tim Conver, just one of the firm’s solar-electric aircraft could provide broadband local access services at “over 1,000 times the capacity of a typical space-based satellite, be deployed at a fraction of the cost of cable and DSL, and be set up in a matter of days.”
It is NASA’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. that has provided seed money to AeroVironment for Pathfinder-Plus operations, Brown said.
The AeroVironment crew loves Kaua’i in the summer, as do the NASA support technicians.
“The Navy at Barking Sands established a working relationship with us on previous research missions, including the record altitude flights,” said Jeff Bauer, Environmental Research Aircraft and Sensor Technology (ERAST) project manager at NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center. “We plan to continue that relationship with this summer’s missions and future missions now being planned,” Bauer said.
He seemed to find AeroVironment’s search for commercial partners a bit infectious. “The Pathfinder Plus is available as a test platform for research and development of commercial missions,” Bauer added.
“If the customer has the funds, we have the capability.”
Staff Writer Paul C. Curtis can be reached at mailto:pcurtis@pulitzer.net or 245-3681 (ext. 224).
