Drone team completes long-endurance flight test.

• Author: Foster, Sharon
• Position: Tech talk

Scan Eagle--a long-endurance, unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) made by Boeing and The Insitu Group--recently completed a 15.2-hour flight at a facility in Boardman, Ore.

ScanEagle "A," the first vehicle in the ScanEagle family, completed the test after taking off autonomously via its wedge catapult launcher. The UAV worked through a series of test points at altitudes ranging between 900 and 2,000 feet, tracking and videotaping stationary and moving targets with an electro-optical camera.

ScanEagle initially was launched into a pre-programmed pattern. Later in the flight, a variety of search patterns and orbits were uploaded, demonstrating the vehicles's ability to accept in-flight...