Coast Guard hopes for UAV by around 2014 - Navy News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Navy Times

Coast Guard hopes for UAV by around 2014

The Coast Guard originally hoped that when it commissioned its first national security cutter, the new ship would have the built-in capability to launch and recover a new type of unmanned aerial vehicle to help with long-range surveillance missions. Although the lifesaving service has its new cutter, the Bertholf — which sailed Friday for a new set of machinery trials and weapons tests — the ship will enter the Coast Guard fleet this year with no UAV in its hangar, and isn’t likely to get one before 2014 at the latest, service officials said Monday.

Rear Adm. Gary Blore, head of the Coast Guard’s acquisitions directorate, told reporters in a conference call that the lifesaving service is still totally committed to adding a UAV to its portfolio, but there is no system available today that meets its needs, and that he doesn’t expect to see one in the fleet for about six years, although it could be sooner.

Officials might not decide on a design until next February, Blore said, citing a $3 million request in the Coast Guard’s fiscal 2009 budget to study which UAV the service should buy. The model that was part of the original Deepwater modernization plan, Bell Helicopter’s Eagle Eye tilt-rotor UAV, was terminated in October.

“We got led astray with our previous project,” Blore said. “We want to make sure that doesn’t happen again. We want something that will serve for many years.”

Blore said the Coast Guard could evaluate adapting a version of Northrop Grumman’s M-Q8A Fire Scout UAV, a small helicopter planned to deploy with the Navy’s littoral combat ship. He also said he has consulted with his Australian coastal patrol counterparts, who use a version of General Atomics’ MQ-1 Predator, a fixed-wing drone that can be armed with laser-guided ground-attack weapons such as the Hellfire missile. But neither model, nor any other among the burgeoning number of rotary-wing UAVs on the defense market, has exactly the capabilities the Coast Guard wants, officials said.

A cutter needs a UAV that can cruise at altitude independently, find a surface target and identify it, said Rear Adm. Ronald J. Rábago, the program executive officer for Deepwater. The current UAVs that can do that, including the Predator, are land-based, he said, but the vertical-takeoff models can’t quite fulfill that mission. The Navy’s Fire Scout doesn’t have an integrated surface-search radar that would enable a cutter captain to send it by itself on a mission over the horizon, Blore said.

Blore provided updates on other programs: The Coast Guard expects to award a contract for the next large Deepwater ship, the Fast Response Cutter, by May or June, and said that the service has approved a “mission needs statement” for the third new large vessel, the Offshore Patrol Cutter. The OPC will likely be too expensive to build at the same time the Coast Guard is paying for the NSCs, Blore said, so those ships aren’t likely to enter the fleet until 2015.