Date: 19 November, 2007
AAI Corporation, a wholly owned subsidiary of United Industrial Corporation, announced today that its Aerosonde unmanned aircraft completed a ‘history-making’ flight into Hurricane Noel on 2 and 3 November 2007, in cooperation with NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility and the US National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
This flight marked three historic milestones, AAI told uavworld: - It was the first hurricane mission in which an unmanned aircraft was able to explore the storm’s inner core, which comprises the hurricane’s eye and boundary layer, the eye wall.
The Aerosonde aircraft successfully penetrated the inner wall of a less dangerous tropical storm event during Tropical Storm Ophelia in 2005. - The 17-hour, 27-minute flight duration was a record, said AAI, for unmanned aircraft hurricane missions. - The Aerosonde aircraft gathered data from as low as 300 feet above the ocean’s surface.
Hurricanes can inflict devastating loss of life and property,” said Joe Cione, lead scientist for this mission and a NOAA hurricane researcher based at the Atlantic Oceanographic and Meteorology Laboratory in Miami, Fla. “The data provided by these missions is critical to advances in hurricane prediction, including structure, path and intensity.”
The Aerosonde aircraft launched from the Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia at 2:08 p.m. on 3 November 2007, trailing and eventually penetrating Hurricane Noel. Flying within the eye wall and eye of the hurricane for approximately 7.5 hours, the aircraft withstood wind gusts of up to 64 knots. Real-time data gathered by the aircraft was streamed to the National Hurricane Center in Miami throughout the flight.
“This mission’s incredible success is the result of an exhaustive effort by AAI’s Aerosonde unmanned aircraft team based at Wallops Island Flight Facility, NOAA, and NASA. We are very proud to be a part of this team,” said Steve Reid, vice president of AAI’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems.
“It isn’t just on the battlefield where unmanned aircraft systems are capable of mastering tasks too dangerous or complicated for manned aircraft. Whether flying within the eye of a hurricane or providing vital battlefield intelligence, unmanned systems such as our Aerosonde aircraft can and do save lives.” Called the Aerosonde Hurricane Boundary Layer Mission, the data gathered from this flight is vital for US hurricane researchers.
The Aerosonde aircraft’s ability to fly at such low altitudes provides new information about how energy from the ocean is directly transferred into the atmosphere, contributing to a hurricane’s path and intensity and resulting in the storm’s highest and most dangerous winds. The Aerosonde unmanned aircraft system is a product of Aerosonde Pty Ltd., of Victoria, Australia, a wholly owned subsidiary of AAI Corporation.