Customs and Border Protection (CBP) yesterday took delivery of its sixth Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS), the latest aircraft being the first maritime variant, which will go through what the agency hopes will be an abbreviated operational test and evaluation phase early next year before beginning operations next spring in the eastern Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean Sea.
The first General Atomics-built MQ-9 Predator B Guardian will be based out of Cape Canaveral Air Station, Fla., and will do mostly counter-drug missions in the source and transit zone, Michael Kostelnik, assistant commissioner for CBP’s Office of Air and Marine, tells TR2. So the aircraft will do a lot of missions for the Joint Interagency Task Force-South, which is part of the U.S. Southern Command.
Navy and CBP P-3 aircraft along with Coast Guard C-130 aircraft currently perform surveillance missions for JIATF-South in the Gulf of Mexico and Caribbean, providing targets for Coast Guard and Naval vessels to conduct interdictions at sea. Adding another air asset will augment the surveillance mission, Kostelnik says.
Given the amount of water to cover in the Caribbean, Gulf of Mexico and Eastern Pacific, “No one in the Western Hemisphere has enough maritime domain awareness,” Kostelnik says. Moreover, the fact that a lot of the Navy P-3s are in for maintenance and repairs and the CBP P-3s are being re-winged means there’s a lot of downtime for the current fleet of aircraft, he adds.
Drug smugglers are operating go-fast boats in these waters and increasingly are relying on self-propelled, semi-submersibles. “It’s a fairly productive area delivering fairly substantial loads” of drugs, Kostelnik says.
A second Predator Guardian has also been purchased by CBP and is slated for delivery in late January. That aircraft will be deployed to the Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, Texas, which hosts one of CBP’s P-3 branches. The Texas-based Guardian will focus on missions in the western Gulf of Mexico, and the maritime regions around South Texas, Mexico and Central America, Kostelnik says.
Coast Guard Participation
While the Guardian is being purchased by CBP, Coast Guard pilots have been, and continue to be, trained to operate the aircraft and will operate alongside Air and Marine personnel, Kostelnik says.
The Coast Guard is currently reviewing its requirements and potential missions for operating UAS, both from its large cutters and possibly from land. The service is looking at a vertical take-off-and-landing (VTOL) UAS that the Navy is interested in for ship-based operations.
“This opportunity with us will give the Coast Guard time to understand what part of their requirement might be satisfied by a land variant,” he says. “And having Coast Guard program managers and pilots and crew members trained on this system will just make them smarter procurers if they decide to go with a VTOL downstream so their requirements would be additive to ours. The next year’s experience with the maritime bird will allow them to decide on what their requirements pull might be.”
CBP and the Coast Guard late last year stood up a joint program office to identify and address common maritime UAS requirements.
The main difference between the Predator B and Predator B Guardian is that the maritime variant will be fitted with belly-mounted sea search radar, Raytheon’s [RTN] SeaVue Marine Search Radar. Understanding the aerodynamics effects of the radar and pod on the airframe will be the key focus of the upcoming OT&E phase, Kostelnik says.
The SeaVue radar is already in use by CBP on its Bombardier [BBD] Dash-8 maritime patrol aircraft and P-3 Long Tracker aircraft supplied by Lockheed Martin [LMT] to CBP.
Another change included in the Guardian is an Automatic Identification System, which in combination with the SeaVue radar will help identify vessels at sea beyond the range of Coast Guard vessels. That information can then be sent back to a Coast Guard cutter, Kostelnik says.
The electro-optic, infrared sensor onboard the Guardian is the same as is used on the Predator B although with some software enhancements for the maritime mission, Kostelnik says.
The Guardian is also equipped with a laser, which helps to identify surface targets, Kostelnik says.
Data collected by the Guardian can be transmitted real-time to Coast Guard vessels, giving their commanders situational awareness, he adds.
In addition to providing CBP and its mission partner’s additional air assets for maritime operations, the Guardian UAS also provides some unique capabilities. One is a 20 hour mission time in the air. And none of CBP’s maritime patrol planes are equipped with an infrared sensor.
“When you get into all of the [missions] that we do in the littoral, off the coast line, in contingencies and emergencies, having an asset overhead in contact with surface vessels of all kinds, [Guardian] has the capability to bring radar, electro-optic, infrared and a laser with full communications package for a 20 hour period, that’s a pretty good benefit we haven’t had,” Kostelnik says.
Kostelnik believes that if the Coast Guard eventually decides to purchase its own land-based UAS, the Guardian is the logical choice for operations relatively close to the littorals. He also says that the airframe has been developed to accommodate multiple types of sea search radars, including the Elta radar used on Coast Guard C-130s.
As for future buys of Guardians, Kostelnik says the FY ’11 budget request will contain enough funds for an additional aircraft although it remains to be seen whether that money would be used for such a purchase or to support the existing fleet. How the operational tests and operations go in the next year will factor into the decision of how to spend the eventually FY ’11 appropriations, he says.