Unmanned Aircraft Attract New Interest From Pentagon.

• Author: Kennedy, Harold

A U.S. Marine stretched a 20-foot bungee cord as far as it would go and released it, launching a 4-pound Dragon Eye unmanned reconnaissance aircraft. Instead of taking to the air, however, the tiny plane--which fits into a backpack--flew straight into the grass.

Unfazed, the Marine simply dusted off the Dragon Eye, and the team launched it again. This time, the tiny aircraft soared up, into the sky, and performed as expected, circling the field, filming and transmitting live video images to a large screen on the ground below.

"One advantage of a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) is that you can have a rough landing and not damage it," Marine Maj. John Cane, from the Marine Warfighting Laboratory, based in Quantico, Va., told an estimated 2,000 spectators at a UAV demonstration in Southern Maryland.

The demonstration featured flights by nine widely different UAVs from all over the United States and as far away as Austria and Japan. They ranged from the hand-launched Dragon Eye, to the 49 foot-wingspanned Predator, to the helicopter-like Camcopter.

The demonstration was conducted earlier this summer at Patuxent Naval Air Station's Webster Field Annex. Webster Field is the headquarters of Fleet Composite Squadron Six Unmanned Air Vehicle Detachment (VC-6 UAV Det), the Navy's only UAV command. The demonstration was co-sponsored by the U.S. Navy and the Association of Unmanned Vehicle Systems International (AUVSI), of Arlington, Va.

Manufacturers were eager to show off their products, hoping to take advantage of the Bush administration's undisguised enthusiasm for unmanned systems. "In my judgment," said Navy Secretary Gordon England at an AUVSI symposium in Baltimore, unmanned systems have the same transformational potential as space.

"We already have unmanned systems typically doing the dull, dirty and dangerous activities that humans shun or are unable to perform, and they have generally performed well in these roles."

It is "critical" to move such promising technology as rapidly as possible from research and development to the operational stage, according to Edward C. (Pete) Aldridge Jr., undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics. One mechanism that has proven successful at taking matured technologies into the field in prototype systems is the Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration, or ACTD, he said during a recent congressional budget hearing. Aldridge had particular praise for two products of the ACTD program, the Predator and Global Hawk UAVs.

The Predator is an unmanned surveillance aircraft built by General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc., of San Diego. Conceived in 1994...