Date: 19 November, 2007
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA ASI), a leading manufacturer of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) and tactical reconnaissance radars has successfully completed wind tunnel testing on a model of its Mariner® unmanned aircraft. GA-ASI conducted aerodynamic testing of the Mariner airframe to support the selection of Team Mariner UAS, an initiative with advanced electronics systems integrator Lockheed Martin, as the solution for the US Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) programme.
Testing was conducted over a two-week period at the San Diego Air & Space Technology Center in southern California with a one-tenth scale model of the Mariner aircraft. The Mariner design is a derivative of the company’s operationally proven turboprop Predator B unmanned aircraft that has been optimized for the unique demands of the US Navy. Aerodynamic testing was performed by a team of engineers from GA-ASI’s Flight Technologies Department and the San Diego Air & Space Technology Center, as well as personnel from the model’s manufacturer, Patersonlabs, Inc. of Kent, Wash.
The goal of the testing was to validate key metrics related to the design performance of the Mariner aircraft. The Mariner wind tunnel testing will help reduce programme risks by providing additional data to improve model fidelity, instead of relying on computational analyses alone. It also provided the opportunity to correlate key performance data to analytical tools such as computational fluid dynamics and to calibrate various analytical methods. In addition, the testing enabled a specific set of configuration changes to be evaluated economically, at a faster pace, and for important performance sensitivities to be generated.
Designed to provide unmanned persistent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) over littoral and broad ocean areas of interest, the Mariner UAS will provide for planning, control, tasking, collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of actionable information in support of the U.S. Navy.
Mariner is the centrepiece of the Team Mariner UAS proposal to the U.S. Navy, offering a system with all-weather performance, maneuverability, altitude agility, and proven mission systems to detect, locate, track, classify, and positively identify maritime surface targets of interest in varying seas states, day or night. The GA-ASI and Lockheed Martin team previously demonstrated the Mariner’s tactical flexibility during the U.S. Navy’s Trident Warrior 06 exercise. Team Mariner UAS key providers include EDO, Honeywell, FLIR Systems, LSI, SNA Corp and SAAB.