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BINGEN, Wash: Insitu, Inc. (Bingen, WA), a pioneer developer of long-endurance, unmanned autonomous aircraft, announced today that it flew a heavy-fuel-engine equipped ScanEagle for 28 hours and 44 minutes using JP5.
Heavy fuel refers to the kerosene-based fuel used in diesel and/or jet aircraft engines such as JP5 and JP8. Military planners have put the development of a heavy-fuel capability for UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) as a high-priority to satisfy the safety concerns of naval operations and to streamline logistics challenges for remote deployments.
The previous longest flight on a ScanEagle was 22 hours and 10 minutes using gasoline. Insitu Project Manager Jeff Ratcliffe commented, “Endurance testing is a critical part of our development program. Initially there were concerns that we would lose endurance switching to heavy fuel. However, the team continues to develop new technologies and advancements which make milestones such as this possible. We have more than 500 hours of ground testing and 50 hours of flight testing, and we are on track to release this capability in 2007.”
“We will continue to validate the configuration over a wide operating envelope. Historically, heavy fuel engines have been a challenge to operate in cold environments, but our endurance flight was conducted in temperatures ranging from -16 degrees C to -6 degrees C and we observed no problems,” reported Insitu Senior Propulsion Engineer Paul Ffield.
ScanEagle is developed in partnership with The Boeing Company and is used to provide services for the US Marine Corps, US Navy, and Australian Army. ScanEagle has logged more than 30,000 hours of flight time since being deployed in 2004. The Block D configuration was modified with licensed technology from Sonex Research, Inc. (Annapolis, MD) and other enhancements developed by Insitu engineers. Sonex develops multi-fuel conversions for spark-ignition engines and has been working with Insitu during the past year on this development program funded through Insitu corporate investment.
