Lt. Trevor Clark, aids to navigation program manager/design engineer for Civil Engineering Unit Oakland, conducts a damage assessment in Hilo Harbor, Hawaii, after Hurricane Lane using Yuneec’s hexacopter drone.
In a promising new pilot program, short-range UAS systems are rapidly changing the way Coast Guard units do their work. By CRAIG COLLINS
On June 17, 2018, not long after the 990-foot cargo vessel American Spirit, fully loaded with iron ore, grounded in Duluth Harbor, Minnesota, Coast Guard Marine Safety Unit (MSU) Duluth had learned nobody had been injured. But an important question remained: Did the harbor have a pollution incident on its hands? Within a half-hour of the grounding, Chief Scott Lenz of Station Duluth’s Aids to Navigation Team had left his son’s baseball game and was on his way back to the harbor. In a phone call with his sector command, he learned the nearest Coast Guard Air Station, in Traverse City, Michigan – 342 miles away, by air – was preparing to dispatch a helicopter and crew to survey the harbor for signs of pollution.
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Coast Guard OUTLOOK
Just a couple of weeks earlier, as part of a Coast Guard pilot project, Lenz’s unit had been the first recipient of a short-range unmanned aircraft system (SR-UAS), the Typhoon H, a battery-powered hexacopter less than 2 feet wide, weighing a little over 16 pounds and equipped with a video camera. Lenz thought the new drone could do the job faster and with significant cost savings. “I said: ‘I’m about 35 minutes out of Duluth. Can I get there and put this UAS up?’ We had never done it before. No one in the Coast Guard had ever done it before. We didn’t even really know how to do it.” It was true: Nobody had ever used a drone to perform an aerial pollution verification for the Coast Guard. But the whole point of the new program was to figure out what was possible with a short-range UAS. Lenz was told
ALL PHOTOS COURTESY OF LT. TREVOR CLARK, ATON PROGRAM MANAGER/DESIGN ENGINEER, CIVIL ENGINEERING UNIT OAKLAND
SHORT-RANGE UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS: DOING YEOMAN’S WORK
