Insitu

Drones Fly Into Postwar Storm: Insitu Faces Shrinking DoD Budget, ITAR, FAA

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GILLIAM COUNTY, OREGON: This isolated test site in rural Oregon is where Boeing subsidiary Insitu takes its drones “to torture them,” said site manager Jerry McWithey. Temperates soar to 110 degrees in summer and plummet to 10 degrees — with 50-knot winds — in winter. The hot-and-cold ordeal the drones go through is a microcosm of the problems facing the company as a whole as the defense spending boom goes bust.

The era of exponential growth is over. When Insitu was founded back in 1998, it had just four people and a plan to build small numbers of small unmanned air vehicles for weather research. Shortly after 9/11, in February 2002, the start-up partnered with aerospace behemoth Boeing to develop military recon UAVs, and its ScanEagle drone (click here for video) first saw action over Fallujah in 2004. Keep reading →

Published November 16, 2012 at 6:00 AM

How To Catch A UAV And Put It In A Box; One Man Needed

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GILLIAM COUNTY, OREGON: Sometimes in this business, you get to see something that’s just plain neat. In this case, it was the ScanEagle (one word), a mini-drone built by Boeing subsidiary Insitu.

[Click here for more about Insitu's uncertain prospects as defense spending declines]. Keep reading →

Published November 14, 2012 at 8:00 AM

Drone On A Wire: Marines ‘Land’ New RQ-21 UAV By Snagging It With Cable

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NAVAL AIR STATION PATUXENT RIVER, MARYLAND: Most drones land the same way manned airplanes do, on a runway. But what if you don’t have a runway? Well, with an unmanned aerial vehicle called the RQ-21, Marines can string up a cable and snag the drone out of the sky.

The military and unmanned aerial vehicle maker Insitu, a subsidiary of Boeing, pioneered the “skyhook” technique with a small drone called Scan Eagle that has seen wide service in Afghanistan and Iraq. But now they’re scaling that technology up with the larger and more capable Insitu Integrator, being developed for the Marines and Navy under the designation RQ-21A. Scan Eagle weighs 44 pounds, about as much as the average four-year-old boy; Integrator weighs 135 lbs, as much as a 14-year-old. That 300 percent increase in weight is literally a stretch for the crane-and-cable mechanism that snatches the drone out of the air in mid-flight. Keep reading →

Published August 1, 2012 at 12:20 PM

DoD Tries Buying Pixels, Not Planes, For Flexible ISR; It Ain’t Leasing

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WASHINGTON: The military can’t buy enough unmanned aerial systems to suit imagery-hungry combat commanders. Procurement programs are harder than ever to start in these days of ever-tightening defense budgets. And using a 20th Century defense acquisition system to buy 21st Century technologies often means getting too little too late too expensively anyway. What to do?

Don’t buy planes, buy pixels — as the U.S. military is doing from companies offering a service best described as “rent-a-drone.” It may be too soon to call rent-a-drone contracts a trend, but they’re a solution both the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) and Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) have turned to in recent weeks to get intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) capability in a hurry. Those involved say it’s a new business model that’s generating considerable interest in the unmanned aircraft industry. Keep reading →

Published May 7, 2012 at 10:30 AM