Army Preps for Gray Eagle Expansion, Promotes Small UAS Competition

By Brett Davis

The U.S. Army is moving to expand the operations of its MQ-1C Gray Eagle unmanned aircraft, deploying more systems to theater while prepping for a full-rate production award this summer.

“It’s been a busy year for the Gray Eagle program,” Col. Timothy Baxter, the U.S. Arm’s project manager for unmanned systems, said in a conference call with reporters.

The first Combat Aviation Brigade using the General Atomics Aeronautical-built Gray Eagle was deployed to Afghanistan last spring and began operations in May. A second brigade is now preparing to deploy in the next 90 days.

Baxter said the results of the systems’ initial operational test and evaluation have “confirmed what we thought … the platform and system is meeting, or very close to meeting, what our reliability requirements were.”

A report on the IOT&E concluded the Gray Eagle is operationally suitable but did note some issues with the One System Remote Video Terminal, intended to give commanders and soldiers access to real-time video.

“Those were training issues, not technical issues,” said Richard Kretzschmar, the deputy project manager for unmanned aircraft systems. With better training, the problems went away, he said.

Competition

The Army recently announced a $248 million contract split between five companies for small unmanned aircraft, and Baxter said more competition in that arena is on the way. The Army is also competing its services program for small UAS and plans to have a request for proposals on the street soon.

“I think industry is happy that we’ve developed this acquisition strategy to be able to compete small UAS across the board,” Baxter said.

The Army plans to compete work for a new engine for the larger Shadow UAS. It has received a dozen solicitations and plans to get that down to five, then will conduct performance and endurance testing this summer to downselect to two vendors. Contracts will follow, with the idea to get new engines in the field in 2014.

“We’ve broken this away from [Shadow prime contractor] AAI and are giving this to industry to get industry involved in the Shadow program,” Baxter said.