NATIONAL HARBOR, Md. – The Marines’ RQ-21A Blackjack small tactical unmanned aerial system will finish its testing this summer and begin workups with a Marine Expeditionary Unit this fall, as contractor Insitu continues to improve the system’s endurance and develop new payloads for the Marines and international customers.
The group-3 UAV recently finished its land-based initial operational test and evaluation at Twentynine Palms, Calif., and is almost done with its ship-based developmental testing on the USS
New York (LPD-21), Col. Jim Rector, program manager for Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office in the Naval Air Systems Command, said at a briefing at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space conference. It will go back out on the New York at the end of May to complete the developmental testing and then again in late July for ship-based IOT&E, he said.
The system used for the testing, along with a detachment from the VMU-2 UAV squadron, will join a Marine Expeditionary Unit for pre-deployment workups in the fall and an overseas deployment in calendar year 2015, Rector said.
The Marine Corps plans to purchase 32 systems –five air vehicles, two ground stations, one launcher and one recovery system, and a host of multi-mission plug-and-play payloads–and will have accepted the first five from Insitu by the end of the year. Each of the three active VMU squadrons will get nine systems each, with the rest given to the one reserve VMU squadron that exists today and hopefully the second reserve squadron the Marine Corps hopes to set up soon, Rector said. Though an entire VMU squadron could deploy together in support of a major contingency, Rector said he’d expect to see just one detachment deploy with each of the four MEUs that deploy each year on amphibious ships.
Despite the testing nearing an end, Insitu Senior Vice President Ryan Hartman said at the same briefing that the company will continue to improve the vehicle. For example, the air vehicle currently has an endurance of about 16 and a half hours and a maximum gross weight of 135 pounds at takeoff. But with a “nonmaterial solution,” Hartman said they expect to get to 145 pounds maximum gross weight, meaning the vehicle could carry 10 more pounds of fuel and get its endurance past 24 hours. Hartman said he expected to have that upgrade made within a year.
And both the Marine Corps and Insitu are exploring a variety of ideas for mission-specific payloads to carry in the payload bay–which can hold 25 pounds of equipment–in addition to its standard payload that includes an electro-optical/infrared dual camera, an automated identification system, laser pointer, laser range finder, communications relay and more, Rector said.
He added that the Marine Corps has about 100 payload ideas being kicked around, many of which he couldn’t elaborate on because they would support the intelligence community. But among his priorities he could discuss, he said he looked forward to adding a ground moving target indicator radar to draw the operators’ attention to moving objects such as vehicles, as well as a mapping radar that could one day map the local roads in an area of operation and in subsequent days identify any changes, such as recently dug holes, that could indicate roadside bombs or other threats.
Hartman said Insitu used its previous intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance service contracts with the Marine Corps and Navy–where it owned and operated the systems while embedded with military units abroad–to test out various state-of-the-art payload sensors to ensure RQ-21A stays relevant to the warfighter.
Among the key revelations that will guide payload development, he said, is that “having something like a UAS that can fly out 50-100 nautical miles away from a hub connects a lot of troops maneuvering in the battle space. We’ll be able to create interoperability” among those troops and their gear by letting them talk to one another through sophisticated communications relay networks in the air, he said.
The payloads can be purchased later as the Marine Corps sees fit. For now, the low-rate initial production 1 contract for just one system has already delivered and is being used in the testing; LRIP 2 will deliver one system this spring, and LRIP 3 will deliver three systems by the end of the calendar year.