Drone Testing
Cahill, who hopes that progress is made soon
by the FAA in defining how this can and
should be done in routine operations. “We
need to break through on BVLOS to enable
longer range and duration missions,” she adds.
ALTERNATE TEST RANGES
Alaska already has plenty of wide-open spaces, rugged
terrain, mountains and extreme weather conditions
where the flight tests can be conducted. But developers
and operators may need more than the few hours of
sunlight a day that Alaska offers during winter to test
their drones.
As the leader of the Pan-Pacific Partnership, Cahill
can refer drone operators and related manufacturers to
her colleagues in Hawaii. For example,
HAPSMobile, a joint venture of
AeroVironment and Japan’s Softbank,
plans to fly its HAWK30 solar powered
unmanned aircraft into the
stratosphere. What better place to
launch the HAWK30 with its
impressive 79.2m wingspan than from
a grass field on the Hawaiian Island of
Lanai. The site used to be a pineapple
field. The electric HAWK30 is powered by
solar panels on top of its wings.
Hawaii UAS Test Ranger director Ted
Ralston said the purpose of the planned HAWK30 flight
tests starting next year will be to check airworthiness,
solar performance, system reliability, communications
payload functionality and certification parameters. The
mission of HAWK30 is to serve as a high altitude pseudosatellite
to provide 5G connectivity by flying in the
stratosphere at around 65,000ft for missions lasting
several months.
“The whole UAV movement
is being held up by some of
the BVLOS limitations”
22 DECEMBER \\ AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM
Ralston says the Alaska test team’s experience with
air traffic compliance, operations management and
aviation’s Safety Management System discipline is
helping his Hawaiian team with drone testing. He adds
that the entire drone community needs to embrace this
type of aerospace discipline and the use of metrics to get
everything to work correctly.
At another FAA test site at New Mexico State
University in Las Cruces, engineering manager
Henry Cathey says he often works with the
Alaska test site on cooperative efforts such
as testing detect and avoid capabilities.
The university affiliated New Mexico
UAS Flight Test Center has a 15,000ft
hangar at Las Cruces International
Airport supporting UAV testing with
drones flying over 15,000 square miles
of southwestern New Mexico at
altitudes of up to 19,999ft. The Alaska and
New Mexico test sites complement one
another by allowing drone operators to conduct
flights in the middle of the summer in New Mexico and
the middle of winter in Alaska.
So if drone developers want to experience “fire and
ice” the Pan-Pacific partnership is the place to be. This is
how Alaska and its team members are making important
contributions to the testing of drones as the FAA tries to
enable the future with the many benefits of widespread
commercial operations. \\
ACUASI says, “One of our big goals up
here is large scale cargo delivery. We see
small package delivery as a novelty.”
Most of these remote communities
depend on air taxi and commuter aircraft
operating under FAA Part 135 rules. A
string of accidents during the summer
prompted the NTSB Chairman Robert L.
Sumwalt to hold a safety roundtable with
100 aircraft operators, safety experts,
industry associations and tribal leaders at
the University of Alaska Anchorage in
September. By that point Alaska
had experienced one of its worst air
safety years ever with 63 accidents and
32 deaths.
“The number of Part 135 fatal
accidents in Alaska is troubling,” he said
at the event, noting the difficult terrain,
bad weather and limited infrastructure.
“It’s easy to say Alaska is different, but
that doesn’t excuse it,” Sumwalt added.
“We need to do better.” Between January
2008 and June 2019, 80 people died in 207
accidents involving Part 135 operations in
the state.
The effect of the accidents is to create
more urgency in Alaska to progress the
use of unmanned aircraft, especially for
hazardous missions such as flying over
frigid oceans that border the state to
count endangered whales. If an aircraft
goes down in the ocean, the chances of
the pilot surviving are not good. “The
whole UAV movement is being held up by
some of the BVLOS limitations,” says
65,000ft
altitude the HAWK30
drone will fly at
3 // uAvionix’s pingRX
ADS-B receiver weighs
five grams, receives
position reports and
displays surrounding
aircraft to the UAS pilot
4 // The HAWK30 drone
during its first flight at the
NASA Armstrong Flight
Research Center, California
3
4
/AEROSPACETESTINGINTERNATIONAL.COM