Alenia Aeronautica starts the Sky-Y UAS fourth flight campaign

The Sky-Y, Alenia Aeronautica’s UAS technological demonstrator, has successfully accomplished its first flight with a flight control system wholly developed by Alenia Aeronautica in collaboration with Alenia SIA at the Italian Air Force’s air base in Decimomannu, Sardinia, the company announced on 18 June.

During this test campaign Alenia Aeronautica will experiment with the new E-FCS (Experimental-FCS), which is a prototype of the system, including an avionic computer, several sensors (inertial, air data, GPS) and electrical actuators for the primary and secondary flight controls.

The system complies with the recent aeronautical certification rules and with the most advanced technical and industrial directives for this kind of equipment, regarding both hardware and software.

The Sky-Y aircraft is on its fourth flight-test campaign and it is envisaged it will complete its testing programme by the end of July 2010, with 15 long-endurance flights. This is the first flight campaign taking place at the Decimomannu air base in Sardinia, thanks to the collaboration with the Ministry of Defence and the Italian Air Force.

Alenia Aeronautica has reached another important step in pursuing the wider project of creating a national industrial capability, able to develop autonomously in Italy the innovative unmanned systems and related subsystems and technologies.

During this flight-test campaign Alenia Aeronautica will also assess the correct integration on the aircraft of systems developed by other Finmeccanica companies such as the EOST45, a high performance passive electro-optical surveillance and tracking system developed by SELEX Galileo, a new wide-band datalink developed by SELEX Communications, a powerful and reliable equipment for the satellite data-link of Telespazio, whose use has been granted to Alenia Aeronautica, within a cooperation agreement, by the Civil Protection Agency of the Piedmont Region.

The Sky-Y has been designed and built as a demonstrator of integration capabilities and innovative technologies developed by Alenia Aeronautica in the field of long endurance and autonomous UAS.

These include systems for autonomous on-board control and for the ground control station, reliable and certifiable for the use of an unmanned air vehicle and with the characteristics of a MALE (medium altitude long endurance) UAS.

Other technologies include low-consumption diesel propulsion, integration of surveillance sensors (capable of detecting and recognising very small objects from long distances during day and night), high-capacity data-processing systems and the broadband datalink (including satellite) to manage and distribute information to end-users on the ground.

Source: Alenia Aeronautica