BQM-147 Dragon - Condor

Condor

The United States Coast Guard is now procuring a "navalized" version of the Dragon Drone under the name "Condor", and intends to use it with Coast Guard cutters and similar small ocean-patrol vessels. The Condor will be useful for missions such as search and rescue or hunting drug traffickers.

Launching and recovering a UAV off such small vessels is troublesome. Naval UAVs have traditionally been launched with a catapult or RATO boosters, and recovered using a net. Not only is this approach unsuited to smaller vessels, it is also not particularly reliable even on large vessels, with catapult launches causing drone damage, catapult failures leading to loss of the drone, and recoveries similarly leading to damage through collisions and unintended ditching.

A Saint Louis, Missouri, company named Advanced Aerospace Technologies Incorporated (AATI) has come up with an alternative scheme for launching and recovering a Dragon Drone or other small UAV from small vessels. The scheme involves the use of a parasail and is referred to the "runway in the sky (RITS)". In AATI demonstrations, a Dragon Drone is attached to a piggyback frame that harnesses the drone to the parasail. The parasail is reeled out into the wind until it reaches an altitude of about 250 meters (800 feet). The drone is then released, diving until it builds up enough speed for the operator to pull it out of the dive and sent it on its mission.

In recovery, the parasail is used to lift a tow line into the sky, with the tow line trailing a series of recovery lines hanging between the parasail and the ship. The drone is flown into the recovery lines, and a snaplock mechanism on the drone's wing grabs onto a line. The drone is then reeled back down to the ship. The tow line has more "give" to it than a recovery net, reducing the likelihood of damage.

The current RITS scheme can handle UAVs weighing up to 180 kilograms (400 pounds), but AATI thinks it can be scaled up to handle larger aircraft. AATI claims the system is inexpensive and easy to use. They also point out that the parasail could also be used to loft an antenna to allow over-the-horizon communications with a UAV. Whether the Coast Guard intends to use this scheme or not is uncertain, but it certainly is an interesting concept.