Army aviation: 'sandblaster' gives helicopter pilots hope for safer landings.

• Author: Colucci, Frank
• Position: Cover story

Landing a helicopter in sandstorms, dust, or snow typically produces a dense cloud that can disorient and blind pilots. In military operations, these treacherous brownout conditions often are to blame for costly mishaps.

The Army has for years been pursuing technologies to help pilots see through blowing dust during landings, but no silver bullet has yet emerged.

As early as this fall, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency will be testing a new landing system for military helicopters that promises safer flying in brownouts.

The system, known as Sandblaster, seeks to provide helicopter pilots an accurate depiction of the outside world by combining various technologies--sensors; digital terrain data, high-tech displays and advanced helicopter flight controls. It enables the pilot to see through the cloud and guide the helicopter to a preset point or let the helicopter land itself while the pilot watches over the landing zone.

"We're working to solve the brownout problem in an integrated, affordable, end-to-end system," say Reggie Brothers Sandblaster program manager at DARPA's strategic technology office.

If Sandblaster performs as expected, it will provide, for the first time, a semi-automated system that would let military pilots land a helicopter, hands off, in brownout conditions.

Pilots currently do make safe brownout landings--employing rolling techniques and relying on crew chiefs looking out the back door. But they're still vulnerable to rollovers, obstructions, and crash descent rates. The technologies developed so far have been piecemeal successes.

DARPA awarded in May a $16.6 million contract to Sikorsky Aircraft to build, by September 2008, a prototype brownout system for the Army's new UH-60M Black Hawk. The long-term goal, Brothers says, is to develop a system that can be adapted for any military helicopter.

"It's far and away the most dangerous thing you can do as a helicopter pilot ... I'm essentially flying a controlled crash into the ground with no outside reference," says Air Force Pave Low Special Operations pilot Maj. Michael Grub.

Brownout clouds start up to 100 feet above the ground for the heaviest helicopters with the greatest rotor downwash. Drifting in a dust cloud to touchdown makes helicopters prone to lateral rollover or ground collisions.

In just the first year of the war in Iraq, brownout mishaps cost the Army three fatalities, 29 non-fatal injuries, and $60 million in equipment damage, notes the Army Aviation Applied Technology Directorate. One Army Chinook was destroyed and 16 soldiers were injured in Afghanistan when the CH-47D set a landing gear in an irrigation ditch.

A study by the Air Force Research Laboratory categorized mishaps across all the military services from 1985 to 2005, and found the risk of brownout accidents to be several times greater at night...