Davenport Aviation markets counter-drone system to Texas DPS
By DRONELIFE Features Editor Jim Magill
Given the rising number of incidents in which drones have interfered with manned aircraft carrying out emergency and law enforcement missions, many public agencies are looking for systems that can help them avoid such potentially dangerous encounters.
To meet that need, Davenport Aviation has launched its Airborne Counter Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ACUS) product, the first aircraft-mounted counter-drone system designed specifically for public safety and law enforcement aviation units.
The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) recently became the first public service agency in the country to deploy the ACUS technology on its aircraft. The DPS is expected to begin field testing ACUS in its helicopters to see how the system aids the agency in the conduct of high-stakes missions such as border patrol, disaster response and criminal surveillance.
“They’re using it to test the effectiveness of it and develop their own tactics, techniques and procedures,” Scott Smith,the director of special projects at Davenport, said in an interview. “What the system does now is provide a passive RF detection of radio frequency-controlled drones.”
The FAA has granted field approval to Columbus, Ohio-based Davenport for its ACUS technology and the company expects to receive approval for a supplemental type certificate for the use of the system sometime in late October or early November.
Smith said the DPS has deployed the ACUS system on board one of its aircraft, integrating the system with the onboard mission computer. The ACUS is designed to improve the situation awareness for the crew of a manned aircraft by pushing alerts to them over their multifunctional display. The system’s user interface allows crew members to interrogate and interact with those alerts.
“They have multiple missions within the DPS, whether it’s on the border or in the cities or in more remote areas within Texas. So, they’re working through their use cases with our detection system that they’ve integrated on their aircraft.
A series of incidents involving conflicts between drones and manned aircraft have pointed to the need for better ways to ensure that the two types of aerial vehicles can safely share the skies.
One noteworthy incident occurred in California when a drone collided with and severely damaged a “Super Scooper,” firefighting aircraft during the devastating Palisades fire last January. The drone pilot agreed to pay more than $65,000 in restitution and faces up to a year in federal prison for the incident.
“In the US there’ve been several drone strikes with law enforcement agencies’ airborne divisions that are based on, we call it in the industry, ‘clueless and careless’ operators,” Smith said. “A lot of individuals out there, whether they’re licensed or unlicensed, they’re flying drones within the airspace where law enforcement is operating. And the skies are getting crowded.”
While most of the drone-manned aircraft encounters in the U.S. are thought to be accidental, the same cannot be said in other nations, where criminal organizations have adopted the use of drones as weapons. Earlier this month a Colombia National Police Black Hawk helicopter, performing a coca-eradication mission was brought down by an explosive-laden first-person-view drone.
Safe separation critical in disaster response
Smith said the need to maintain safe separation between manned and unmanned aerial vehicles is especially acute in disaster situations, such as floods or wildfires, when the crews of the public safety aircraft should be focusing their attention to responding to the disaster itself.
“Their own drones are operating; media drones are operating. And then you typically have civilians that want to go out and see what’s happening because so many people have drones. So, the airspace gets crowded around an incident,” he said.
Aircraft equipped with the ACUS technology will not only be able to detect and identify UAS that are operating as part of the official incident response, as well as drones that are in the airspace under control of independent pilots.
“It gives them that visual of what else is flying out there around their manned aircraft,” Smith said.
Davenport systems engineer Jack McHugh said in addition to helping spot and track UAV operating in close proximity to a manned aircraft, the ACUS system also can help the crew of that aircraft locate the drone pilot on the ground.
“Depending on what the drone is transmitting, we can pick up the pilot location or the home location from which it originated. And once you have that, the powerful thing you can do from the helicopter, we call it slew-to-cue,” he said. “A dropdown shows you the drones that you’re detecting and you can choose to slew to the pilot location, which will get the drone operator in the field of view of your camera.”
The crew of the law enforcement aircraft then could relay the drone pilot’s location to officials on the ground, who could reach out to the pilot and instruct him to bring his vehicle down or move it to a location where it would interfere with disaster response operations.
Smith said Davenport is developing the next iteration of its drone-detection technology, adding drone-mitigation to its capabilities. Because federal law and FAA regulations prohibit the deployment of such technology by civilian law enforcement personnel, Davenport is looking toward marketing its next generation of products to the U.S. Department of Defense and to the militaries of countries allied with the U.S.
“At the highest level of this technology, we would be using it for kinetic defeat of drones, and new applications where you would be able to use an armed aircraft, maybe in places like Ukraine,” he said.
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Jim Magill is a Houston-based writer with almost a quarter-century of experience covering technical and economic developments in the oil and gas industry. After retiring in December 2019 as a senior editor with S&P Global Platts, Jim began writing about emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence, robots and drones, and the ways in which they’re contributing to our society. In addition to DroneLife, Jim is a contributor to Forbes.com and his work has appeared in the Houston Chronicle, U.S. News & World Report, and Unmanned Systems, a publication of the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
