From surviving in contested airspace to supplying remote areas, interest in unmanned transport and tanker aircraft is growing.
A U.S. Senate committee is proposing funding to “explore options for optionally manned and more survivable tankers,” while Russia’s Ilyushin is studying an unmanned cargo demonstrator based on the Il-112V light transport.
In its markup of the fiscal 2019 defense budget, the Senate Armed Services Committee says it is “concerned about the growing threat to large high-value aircraft” and recommends an increase of $10 million, for a total of $38.4 million, for prototyping a contested environment tanker.
Essential to the operational availability and range of U.S. combat and transport aircraft, the Air Force’s Boeing KC-135 and KC-46A aerial refueling tankers “are manned and increasingly difficult to protect,” the committee says.
“Given the increasingly challenging operating environments our potential adversaries are presenting, it is prudent to explore options for optionally unmanned and more survivable tankers that could operate autonomously as part of a large, dispersed logistics fleet that could sustain attrition in conflict,” it says.
An unmanned tanker prototype could draw on research underway at Boeing to increase the level of automation in its commercial aircraft and to address a looming pilot shortage by introducing supervised autonomy, as well as demonstrations of a robotic co-pilot by subsidiary Aurora Flight Sciences under Darpa’s Alias program.
In Russia, meanwhile, Ilyushin has signed a memorandum with Kronstadt Group to create a joint working group to develop an unmanned transport aircraft. Kronstadt is developing the Orion-E, Russia’s first Predator-class medium-altitude, long-endurance UAV.
“It is in our interests to create transport drones that could solve the tasks of cargo transportation to remote areas with difficult accessibility,” says Alexey Rogozin, general director of Ilyushin and vice president for transport aviation at parent company United Aircraft Corp.
The first prototype Il-112V military transport is nearing completion at the VASO aircraft manufacturing plant in Voronezh and is expected to fly this year. Powered by two 3,500-shp Klimov TV7-117ST turboprops, the aircraft has a maximum payload of 11,000 lb. and a range of 1,500 nm with a 7,700-lb. load.
“Given the active development of the Arctic, it can be assumed that aircraft capable of transporting up to several tons of cargo from one point to another in an autonomous mode will be highly demanded,” Rogozin says.
“We want to be technologically ready to open this market. Joint work with [Ilyushin] will allow us to optimize the time and resources, and therefore the first to create answers to market demands,” says Kirill Dybko, executive director of Kronstadt Group.
The first step under the joint working group will be to create a road map for research. Kronstadt’s Center for Advanced Studies and Ilyushin’s Center for Aerospace Technologies in Zhukovsky will be involved in the project. The Myasishchev design bureau, part of Ilyushin, will later become the main focus for the work.
Kronstadt presented a three-stage plan for the introduction of unmanned air cargo services at the Aeronet-18 conference in Moscow on June 1. This begins with “last mile” delivery of small packages, then shifting short- and medium-range freight from land transport to aircraft, and finally regular long-haul cargo transport using unmanned aircraft.
In the medium term, Kronstadt says in a June 1 release, the Aviation Unmanned Transport Network project is being implemented. “A demonstrator of a transport unmanned aerial system is being created and a pilot project on unmanned delivery of goods on a regional scale is being implemented.”