Photo courtesy Petty Officer 1st Class Shawn Eggert/U.S. Coast Guard.

By Danielle Lucey



The Coast Guard’s Research and Development Center teamed this summer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, launching an AeroVironment Puma from the Coast Guard cutter Healy as a part of an exercise to determine the system’s ability in the extreme cold. 



It’s called the Oil in Ice Project, and while buoys and submersibles collected data from the water, the Puma did its part flying over the Arctic Ocean. 



“UAS technology is already used by NOAA for gathering data and collecting imagery, but this system has rarely been tested in the Arctic,” says Todd Jacobs, a NOAA project scientist in NOAA’s UAS program. “In 2013, we launched a Puma AE from the Healy and tested its flight endurance in cold weather. This year, we developed procedures for landing the system directly onto the flight deck, something that had never before been done on a Coast Guard vessel.”



“The Arctic is a cold, dangerous place, and there’s always some risk any time a small-boat crew gets underway,” says Bill Jankowski, an RDC program lead traveling aboard the Healy. “Having the ability to land a UAS aboard a vessel rather than in the water is important, because it means crew members don’t have to be put at unnecessary danger by going out to retrieve it.”



In addition to the new landings, operators used the Puma’s infrared and electro-optical camera to look at video of a simulated oil spill and relay that information to NOAA’s Emergency Response Management Application database.



“UAS can support anything from migrant and drug interdiction operations to search and rescue, fisheries enforcement or ice recon. It’s a technology with a lot of potential to help the Coast Guard in the Arctic,” says Jankowski. “These unmanned systems are never going to replace our rescue swimmers or our boat crews, but they show a lot of promise in enhancing Coast Guard missions wherever we serve.”