A new task order from the U.S. Naval Air Command (NAVAIR) will include putting the newest generation of Textron Systems’ Aerosonde unmanned aircraft on a Navy ship for up to 32 months, and increasing the percentage of Textron’s contractor owned, contractor operated (COCO) work with the U.S. military.
 
Textron Systems introduced the latest version of the venerable Aerosonde UAS last year and will be prepping it to serve on the USNS Hershel “Woody” Williams, an expeditionary sea base (ESB) ship aimed at supporting a variety of missions, next year, says David Phillips, senior vice president and general manager of Textron Systems. 
 
The company would have the flexibility to use its hybrid quad version, which can take off and land vertically. There was no particular requirement for that, but “we would endeavor to provide hybrid quad just to gain experience with hybrid quad at sea, that’s kind of at our own discretion,” he says.
 
Aerosonde has an endurance of more than 14 hours, a range of 75 nautical miles and can carry a payload of up to 20 pounds, suitable for the full-motion video intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance missions that Phillips says are in increasing demand. 
 
“It is always EO/IR [electro-optical/infrared], they always want full motion video. I believe they always want automatic identification system. They sometimes want communications relay and they sometimes want some kind of electronic warfare or a signals intelligence payload,” he says.
 
Operating from sea will not pose a problem, Phillips says.
 
“Our customers have recognized that while it might seem different, operating on and off of a ship is not that much different in terms of how contractor owned contractor operated works,” he says. “You still have to be a very reliable product. You still have to provide multi-mission capability. You have to have to integrated payloads like automatic identification system into your aircraft, as we’ve done. They like wide area search. I would say 90 percent of what makes up COCO operations on land is transferable to sea, maybe even 95 percent.”
 
The company demonstrated that earlier this year when it went shipboard on the USS Gunston Hall for a 3.5-month deployment that saw it “taking taskings from a variety of customers,” including the U.S. Navy Fourth Fleet, a Marine Corps task force and others, for humanitarian relief, counter-drug trafficking and other missions.
 
Textron completed that deployment with a multinational exercise, UNITAS, that included militaries from Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru, Chile and Ecuador, with the Aerosonde providing ISR “to all of those navies.
 
“All the landings, all the experiences, from that three-month contract that we had all go into the deployment that we look so forward to executing” on the Hershel “Woody” Williams, he says.
 
COCO rising
 
COCO work now makes up about a third of Textron Systems’ overall Unmanned Systems business, but the vast majority of the Aerosonde business, Phillips says. With the appetite for ISR, and “a model that is so flexible, I see that growing, I do,” he says.
 
“At the beginning, it’s a steep learning curve,” he says. “For anybody in a COCO environment, it’s kind of transitioning the contractor into lifecycle management. … We, like anyone else who has taken on COCO, has to learn the whole lifecycle. You learn your system, you learn remove and replace cycles, you learn reliability, you learn obsolescence, all those things that U.S. government lifecycle owners have known for a long time.”
 
X5-55
 
If Aerosonde and Shadow are the present, the future is flying daily down at the company’s test facility in Blacksburg, Virginia. That’s the home base for Textron’s flying testbed, the X5-55. Unveiled at AUVSI’s Xponential show in Denver, the X5-55 is meant to push the envelope with capabilities that aren’t even required yet, such as fully vectored thrust.
 
“It’s not really focused on any specific product-based commercial marketplace per se, it’s really our foray into enabling technology that we’ve already scaled up and down, that enable us to react very quickly to future unmanned aircraft systems requirements,” Phillips says. “We want to follow what the Army is thinking and doing, we want to be able to work with the technologies that enable us to get a system to meet the requirements that they’re envisioning now.”
 
Vectored thrust might be one way to do that, he says, as it has several advantages over even the hybrid quad Aerosondes.
 
“We’re able to take off from a very confined space, loiter in a very confined space, hover and propel ourselves with much better agility than even hybrid quad, [which] just operates in the vertical and then you have your forward thrust engine that operates you in the lateral,” he says. “This would be kind of a combination of both.”
 
The X5-55 has now flown hundreds of hours at Blackstone, where it operates alongside Aerosondes and Shadows.
 
“The stuff that we’re doing with Aerosonde is more about real time and emergent [requirements], and maybe closer in, but X5-55 is getting ahead of even what’s been defined yet,” he says.

Above and below: Textron Systems' X5-55 flying testbed. Photos: Textron Systems