Preserving capacity, General Tom Lawson, Chief of the Defence Staff, Keys to Canadian SAR
Issue link: http://vanguardcanada.uberflip.com/i/507045
Gimme shelter: A blast-resistant solution T Technology 30 APRIL/MAY 2015 www.vanguardcanada.com Goose Bay, where more than six million pounds of explo- sives have been dropped since 1985 by Canadian and NATO aircraft. National Defence, however, had other ideas: coastal de- fence and providing anti-sub- marine warfare data. "The real innovation is the system," says Brican's presi- dent Brian McLuckie. "While most sys- tems are either large or small, we're kind of in the middle with a lightweight platform capable of fl ying up to 1,000 kilometres." With a nearly fi ve-metre wingspan and a gross weight of 55 pounds, the TD100 is slightly bigger than the ScanEagle, the UAV manufactured by Boeing and Insitu that was deployed by both the Canadian Army and Royal Canadian Navy. Like the ScanEagle, the TD100 is launched auton- omously via a pneumatic wedge catapult. The aircraft will carry CAE magnetic anomaly detection sensors (MAD-XR) as part of its testing process for the anti-sub- marine detection role. Brican is also explor- ing variants able to fl y well above 20,000 feet and carry as much as 20 pounds, as well as fl y for up to 40 hours with a maximum range of 2,000 nautical miles. While multirole helicopters and medi- um- to high-altitude UAVs serve a neces- sary purpose in ASW, all come with a con- siderably larger price tag than the TD 100. According to data recently released by the Australian Armed Forces, the cost of op- erating a MRH-90 (which replaced the Australian Sea King) is almost US$12,000 per fl ight hour while an IAI Heron UAV is about $9,500 and a ScanEagle is $2,700. There is great potential for mid-sized UAS such as the TD100 for costal defence and ISR, as evidenced by the recent use of the ScanEagle by the French carrier battle At fi rst there were doubts: how could a temporary air shelter provide effective and effi cient personnel protection against overhead and ground-launched ballistic threats? "People just did not expect [our shelter] to perform as well as it does," ad- mits Harold Warner, president of Dynamic Air Shelters, the Newfoundland and Lab- rador company that builds the Integrated Ballistic Protection System (IBPS). Dynamic Air Shelters has been manu- facturing rapidly deployable temporary air shelters for 14 years, but unlike shelters for fi rst responders or industrial applications, a blast-resistant version offered some unique challenges, starting with "being able to move that much of a sand-fi lled wall vertically and do that conveniently without excess equipment," Warner says. The IBPS shelter has blast resistant doors and the structure recovers quickly from both the shock wave and the debris of an explo- sion, even from a 5.9 psi blast or 155mm artillery detonated fi ve metres away. group in the Persian Gulf. Brampton- based Brican can also see rising interest in surveillance of critical energy infrastruc- ture, geophysical surveys and wildlife sur- veys, especially in the High North. As of April, Brican was still waiting to hear more from the RCAF. In the mean- time, the TD100 was selected by the Na- tional Research Council of Canada as its "platform of choice" for a program aimed at developing advanced civilian UAVs ap- plication. McLuckie said he was hoping that the BCIP will "help attract interested parties within the defence agencies be- cause of the potential [the aircraft] offers Canada."