News media will have an opportunity April 3, 2003, to
see flight demonstrations of collision-avoidance systems
being developed to enable Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to
fly safely in civil airspace shared with piloted aircraft.

NASA has sought to use UAVs in scientific and commercial
applications, particularly to study the Earth’s environment
with high-altitude long-endurance UAVs. The full potential of
UAVs cannot be realized, however, until they demonstrate the
ability to operate safely and routinely within the existing
air-traffic management system.

NASA’s Dryden Flight Research Center, Edwards, Calif., in
cooperation with Scaled Composites, LLC, Mojave, Calif., has
been conducting flight demonstrations of collision-avoidance
systems necessary to achieve the “equivalent level of safety”
of a piloted aircraft. The ability to sense and avoid
conflict is a key step toward allowing UAVs to fly routinely
and reliably in the national civil airspace. A series of
flight evaluations of a “Detect, See and Avoid” system that
can detect “non-cooperative” aircraft without operating
transponders is scheduled for the first week of April near
Mojave, Calif.

As with a prior flight series last year near Las Cruces,
N.M., that focused on “cooperative” transponder-equipped
aircraft the primary test aircraft will be Scaled Composites’
Proteus. For this series, the Proteus will be equipped with a
35 GHz radar system intended to detect any approaching
aircraft on a potential collision course, regardless of
whether the intruder is equipped with an operating
transponder.

The Proteus and a variety of target aircraft, ranging from a
hot-air balloon to a high-speed NASA F/A-18 jet, will fly 22
different simulated-conflict scenarios over a three-day
period. During the flight demonstrations, Proteus will be
controlled remotely by a pilot in a ground station. Radar
data will be relayed to the ground station via either a line-
of-sight telemetry link or an over-the-horizon satellite
link, and the ground pilot will command the Proteus to change
course as needed.

News media representatives will have the opportunity to view
the flight demonstrations and speak with project engineers
and pilots on Thursday, April 3, beginning at 10 a.m. Pacific
time at Scaled Composites’ Hangar 77 at the Mojave Airport.
Representatives of NASA, Scaled Composites and Modern
Technology Solutions Inc., Alexandria, Va., will be available
to brief reporters and respond to their questions. In
addition, media representatives will have an opportunity to
view the ground station in action during a flight, as well as
most of the aircraft being flown in the demonstrations.
Background materials, including B-roll video for television
journalists, will be available.

Media representatives planning to attend should contact
either Patti Bird at Scaled Composites at (661) 824-4541 or
Alan Brown at Dryden at (661) 276-2665, no later than April 1
for accreditation, security clearance and directions to the
site. All media representatives must be U.S. citizens.