The Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (PMA-263)&nbsp;program team&nbsp;put&nbsp;Long Range Tactical (LRT)&nbsp;systems&nbsp;through their paces during a two-week technical demonstration&nbsp;in&nbsp;Chaptico, Maryland&nbsp;in mid-July.Five&nbsp;vendors&nbsp;attended&nbsp;the event to&nbsp;help&nbsp;inform&nbsp;the Marine Corpsof&nbsp;the functions and capabilities&nbsp;available&nbsp;on the&nbsp;commercialmarket&nbsp;for the Family of Small UAS (FoSUAS).&nbsp;The&nbsp;five systems evaluated include: AeroVironment P550, Kraus-Hamdani K1000 ULE Block II, Aurora&nbsp;Skiron&nbsp;X, Edge Autonomy Stalker LRT, and Vector Longbow.All systems are fixed wing,&nbsp;vertical take-off and landing&nbsp;Group 2 unmanned systems.&nbsp;In addition to basic measurements, the vendors collected&nbsp;performance data for ease of operation, audibility,&nbsp;range, and endurance while carrying the maximum payload requirement of seven pounds.PMA-263’s&nbsp;FoSUAS&nbsp;team, in partnership with the University of Maryland&nbsp;(UMD)&nbsp;UAS test site,&nbsp;evaluated each system against a standard test card to determine its suitability&nbsp;for&nbsp;the&nbsp;MarineCorps&nbsp;LRT&nbsp;requirements.&nbsp;UMD’s team of evaluators are experienced drone pilots, experts in their field and some, have military service, including program director Jim Alexander.“This is a great relationship for the University of Maryland and PMA-263,” said&nbsp;Alexander, who has worked with the program office for nine years for technical evaluation events like the LRT tech demonstration. “Our job is to serve as an impartial third party;&nbsp;but in the&nbsp;process,&nbsp;we get to learn new&nbsp;systems,&nbsp;and the Navy is able to collect a lot of data in a short amount of time.”The&nbsp;Small&nbsp;UAS Capabilities and the Deputy Commandant for Plans, Policies and Operations&nbsp;team and PMA-263’s team attended the event and&nbsp;had the opportunity&nbsp;to engage directly with the participating vendors and to observe the flight demonstrations.&nbsp;“Flight demonstration events like this are a critical market research function for the PMA and help us to validate performance data reported by vendors,” said&nbsp;Olivia Douglass, PMA-263&nbsp;FoSUAS&nbsp;Integrated Product Team&nbsp;lead. “We would love to see all the vendors meet the&nbsp;requirements;&nbsp;it translates into options for the government and options for the end users.&nbsp;We want to see&nbsp;industry taking an interest in recognizing end user requirements and using that as a&nbsp;driving&nbsp;factor in improving their systems.”PMA-263 will use&nbsp;University of Maryland&nbsp;UAS test site’s &nbsp;assessment data&nbsp;and observer feedback&nbsp;from the event&nbsp;to inform&nbsp;the program’s&nbsp;priorities for follow-on engineering assessments,&nbsp;potential&nbsp;for&nbsp;operational testing, and&nbsp;inclusion&nbsp;of new platforms within the&nbsp;FoSUAS&nbsp;programs of record.

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The Navy and Marine Corps Small Tactical Unmanned Aircraft Systems (PMA-263) program team put Long Range Tactical systems through their paces during a two-week technical demonstration in Chaptico, Maryland in mid-July.

Marines Demo Range of Long Range UAS for Future Operations

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