Toogoolawah, Queensland: It was with an aim to tap into the growing market in Asia Pacific and the increasing volume of business in the unmanned aerial systems that Insitu, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Boeing, established Insitu Pacific in Australia. The decision to open shop in Australia was an easy one for the Insitu when it decided to expand — Australian Defence Forces have been using the services of their most popular UAV onboard — ScanEagle for the past three years in the Iraq and Afghanistan theatre.

The company in Australia is now involved in management, operations, business support, maintenance and logistics of UAS systems. The company officials are based not just in Brisbane but Afghanistan and other exercise locations as well, where ScanEagle is deployed, Andrew Duggan, managing director, Insitu Pacific said.

ScanEagle with its history of deployments has registered unsurpassed presence in naval Tier II UAV operations and is presently in use with land forces across the globe. Beginning its involvement with military customers since 2003, ScanEagle was first deployed in Iraq by US in 2004 followed by US ships in 2005. In 2006, the Australian Army used it extensively in Iraq which was followed by the US and Australian forces in Afghanistan in 2007. The UAV has flown 30,000 hours with ADF alone and over 300,000+ hours world over.

Besides the army, the UAV has been successfully deployed onboard the US navy ships in the Gulf of Aden for surveillance and to increase situational awareness in piracy-infested waters. The biggest USP apart from its very little signature is its runway — less take off and recovery, making it easily-deployable on board ships. The concept of operations behind the ScanEagle is that it provides persistent IR or EO surveillance. The UAV can carry additional payloads including radio repeater, BCAS, Heavy Fuel Engine, OMM, MiniSAR, cooled MWIR, personnel and vehicle tracking. The UAV can move within 100km radius from Launch & Recovery point, which can be co-located.

Duggan said a range of new payloads have recently become available as part of the ScanEagle baseline and are available now for operational deployment. These include the Mid Wave Infrared radar (MWIR), which converts ScanEagle into ‘NightEagle’, enabling surveillance at night as well. The upgraded camera sensor can be installed on a ScanEagle in two hours and can be launched and recovered from the same vehicles as used for ScanEagle. Duggan elaborated that initially the feedback for NightEagle pointed at limitations of the un-cooled IR sensor and noisy UAS. In response, Insitu fielded a cooled IR sensor in the MWIR band combined with a Hushkit (a device used to reduce noise from the engine) equipped AV. The NightEagle is currently deployed by Australian Army in Afghanistan.