Unmanned

A company that specializes in manufacturing unmanned aircraft is planning to build a 20,000-square-foot plant at the Carroll County Regional Airport in Westminster.Freewing Aircraft, a product of the University of Maryland's Technology Advancement Program, plans to move from its College Park development facilities by year's end.TAP is the university's high-tech incubator, which gives businesses staff, equipment and technological support to get started. Freewing, incorporated in 1978, entered the program in 1989.

Description : NASA's Hurricane Severe Storm Sentinel Mission, also known as HS3, is exploring the massive tropical systems from high altitudes via two unmanned Global Hawk aircraft. Instruments on board the planes will collect data researchers and meteorologists plan to use to better understand how tropical storms and hurricanes form and strengthen. Researchers : Scott A. Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, is the mission's principal investigator.

One day not long from now, planes without pilots could share the skies with commercial airliners. Equipped with infrared imaging, these flying robots could patrol the nation's borders for illegal immigrants and fly over storm-ravaged regions looking for survivors. With a digital video camera, they could spot illegal activity on street corners and spy backups and bottlenecks on roads. One local company, Hunt Valley-based AAI Corp., is poised to benefit from the emerging domestic market for unmanned aerial vehicles, or UAVs.

During the Patterson Park pagoda's 120 years of existence, it has been photographed, painted and otherwise rendered too many times to count. But never in all that time did anyone depict the landmark the way Terry and Belinda Kilby just did. No one zoomed in close enough to count each roof tile. No one let you see right over the balcony rail and onto each of the three decks. No one swooped in like a pigeon would, coming in beak-level with the weather vane to take in the observatory's 60-foot span and the city's northeastern neighborhoods stretching behind it. The Kilbys did it with their feet planted in the park grass - but with their camera soaring through the air, attached to a drone.

The U.S. Army signed an $86.1 million contract with AAI Corp. yesterday to begin full production of the Shadow unmanned surveillance aircraft, giving the Hunt Valley contractor's top product a valuable endorsement as the company searches for potential buyers. While expected, the contract was considered a major score for AAI, which now can claim the nation's first full-rate production line for an unmanned aerial vehicle of its kind. The Pentagon uses numerous unmanned aircraft for surveillance, reconnaissance and combat missions, but the Shadow is the first to be deemed both sufficiently reliable and militarily useful to warrant the commitment of a large-scale production contract.

It's billed as one of the quirkiest, cutting-edge cross-country competitions in history: a pack of souped-up racers galloping through 250 miles of desert between California and Las Vegas for a million in cash. The catch: Computers will be at the controls. The Grand Challenge is part Baja 500, part BattleBots. Since organizers began accepting signups last month, the race has attracted everyone from former NASA engineers to garage monkeys like Chris Pedersen, a former stock car racer who boasts that his team's "strong suit is low tech.

J oe Bollinger in Glen Burnie asks: "How is snow measured at an unmanned weather station?" Some aim a video camera at a ruler. But the National Weather Service uses humans. Snow falls on a white, plywood "snow board," and is measured with a stainless steel ruler. The board is wiped clean every six hours. BWI's weather station is unmanned, but its snow board is tended by a control tower employee under contract to the NWS.

Baltimore July 30-Aug. 3 Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International, Baltimore Convention Center, Pratt & Howard streets. Estimated attendance: 600. Aug. 3-4 Lionel Train show, Convention Center. Estimated attendance: 700 plus. Aug. 4-8 Rite Aid Corp. convention, Convention Center. Estimated attendance: 5,000. Contact: John Learish, 703-803-7717 Aug. 19-27 Orgill Fall Dealer Market, Convention Center. Estimated attendance: 4,000. Contact: Steve East, 901-948-3381, Ext. 314 Aug. 31-Sept.

Once a kid's backyard toy and now a soldier's battlefield tool, the model airplane may soon expand to new terrain and a less expected set of people: cell phone users. A California company is testing a pilotless plane that can fly 12 miles high for a week straight with an antenna to beam cell phone and Internet signals places they can't go now or, to the frustration of the wireless, only go intermittently. Telecommunications is just one everyday use envisioned for this kind of plane - called an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV - which is used by the armed forces for spying, surveillance and bombing missions considered, in industry speak, as too "dull, dirty or dangerous" for service personnel.

Shares of United Industrial Corp. tumbled more than 20 percent yesterday after the Hunt Valley company reported first-quarter profit down nearly one-third from a year ago. While the manufacturer of unmanned aerial vehicles and aircraft training simulators saw a 28 percent increase in revenue for the quarter, officials blamed the sharp drop in profit on a property sale a year ago that boosted earnings. Excluding the one-time gain, the company missed analysts' forecasts by 5 cents a share.

The recent crash of a $176 million Navy drone in a Chesapeake Bay marsh highlights a number of brewing issues over the domestic use of this new technology. Over the past decade, since the United States' invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and framed by the Bush and Obama administrations' war on terror, the use of drones as both a surveillance tool and a means to kill insurgents has increased. This is a story about effective law enforcement, proper training, the associated costs - and the deadly consequences, intentional or not. Although there was some public consternation last year regarding the use of drones (also known as unmanned aerial vehicles or UAVs)

If all goes as planned, sometime this morning a spacecraft will blast off from its launchpad in Cape Canaveral, Fla., and ride a fiery plume of contrails upward through the pre-dawn darkness to begin a two-week journey to the International Space Station and back. But the flight won't be just another NASA resupply mission. Instead, the Falcon 9 rocket and its unmanned Dragon cargo capsule built by Space Exploration Technologies Corporation - SpaceX for short - will be the first commercially owned and operated vehicle ever to rendezvous with the station's orbiting astronauts.

AAI Corp. of Hunt Valley has developed an unmanned surface vessel that can send devices deep into the ocean to detect mines and other threats. The company, a division of Textron Inc., hopes the U.S. Navy will choose the technology to be deployed on its littoral combat ships. The company behind the Shadow spy plane used to pick up counterintelligence over the battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan is taking its technology to the seas. AAI Corp. of Hunt Valley has developed an unmanned surface vessel that can send devices deep into the ocean to detect mines and other threats.

J oe Bollinger in Glen Burnie asks: " How is snow measured at an unmanned weather station?" Some aim a video camera at a ruler. But the National Weather Service uses humans. Snow falls on a white, plywood "snow board," and is measured with a stainless steel ruler. The board is wiped clean every six hours. BWI's weather station is unmanned, but its snow board is tended by a control tower employee under contract to the NWS. > Read Frank Roylance's blog on MarylandWeather.

The $1.1 billion deal announced yesterday to sell Hunt Valley-based United Industrial Corp. to a competitor is a measure of how much the U.S. military depends on unmanned spy planes to spare soldiers in two intractable wars. United Industrial, whose Shadow drone is deployed over battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, will be acquired by Textron Inc., a corporation based in Providence, R.I. Textron produces Bell helicopters and Cessna aircraft and also makes golf carts, auto parts and surveillance systems.

AAI Corp. parent United Industrial Corp. saw sales and profit rise in the first quarter, with the war continuing to fuel demand for AAI's unmanned aircraft systems and aircraft maintenance trainers. Net income from continuing operations rose 31 percent to $10 million, or 75 cents per diluted share, from $7.7 million, or 61 cents per share, for the comparable period a year ago. The Hunt Valley-based company reported a loss of $800,000 on discontinued operations after divesting Detroit Stoker Co., which makes combustion equipment for alternative-energy companies.

AAI Corp. announced yesterday that Frederick M. Strader, general manager of its defense systems business, has been named president and chief operating officer and given responsibility for all day-to-day operations of the Hunt Valley defense contractor. Richard R. Erkeneff, who has served as president and chief executive officer of AAI since 1992, will continue as chief executive. The move comes just as the company enters a crucial production phase of its marquee defense product - the Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle, which won an $86.1 million contract from the U.S. Army this month.

There's a new eye in the sky aiming to give the Air Force a better look at threats lurking on the battlefield. SkyWatcher, the first of two types of unmanned aerial vehicles built by Germantown-based Proxy Aviation Systems Inc., successfully completed a critical round of trials conducted this month at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida, the company announced yesterday. Unlike most drones, which are controlled from the ground, SkyWatcher is based on a kit airplane that also can be flown by a pilot.