MoD proposes Salisbury Plain spy-plane droid playground

Lewis Page
The Register
Wednesday, June 18, 2008

The UK Ministry of Defence wants to expand the airspace it uses for training flying-robot surveillance operators from the British Army. Drone aircraft formerly flew mainly above traditional army exercise areas on Salisbury Plain, but next-gen kit will need to be higher up and further away from the ground action if training is to be realistic.

"Unmanned aircraft are proving to be a great asset in improving the effectiveness of deployed forces, particularly in the intelligence and surveillance roles," according to Commander Dennis Ryan from the MoD.

"The new generation of equipment has considerably improved performance and sensor capability that requires integration into military training exercises."

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This would be done by allowing the new aircraft to fly at much greater slant distances - up to 15 miles - from simulated wars taking place on Salisbury Plain. The MoD proposes to establish a new block of segregated airspace which would be activated when drone training was taking place. At present, manned and unmanned aircraft can't share airspace over the UK. The areas on the map would be periodically reserved for robots between flight levels 80 and 160*.

The next generation of Army kit that the MoD are on about is specifically the Watchkeeper drone, an upgraded version of the Israeli Hermes 450s already bought to replace the former, ill-fated "bugger-off" Phoenix. The Army's drone jockeys have been trained up on Hermes 450 largely overseas, and the robo spy-planes are thought to have gone pretty much directly from Israel to the warzones of Southwest Asia, but Watchkeeper will be at least partially UK-made. Also, in the longer run the Army may not have quite such wide opportunities for learning on the job overseas, so one can see why they want the new UK airspace.

That said, it's quite possible to imagine that the Afghanistan conflict will last long enough for new autopilot tech to be developed, allowing UAVs to fly in non-segregated airspace.

In any case, the MoD have hired the controversial spinoff trough-scoff company Qinetiq - which also has the Watchkeeper test contract - to run a public consultation on their plans to fill the Salisbury skies with flying robots.

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