The flight deck of an amphibious ship never has been “available”. It is booked out of helicopters, MV-22s, cargo transfers, hot refuels, and the endless jugging it takes to maintain the separation of people and machines by inches, rather than feet. That is the setting in which the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit has been visualized operating V-BAT unmanned aircraft flights out of USS Portland, and demonstrates how a small VTOL drone can be maneuvered through regular shipboard waves without the need of catapults, arresting gear, or a runway length.
The argument is simple: a MEU must have eyes and ears that are persistent, but each hour of manned rotary-wing time in a routine collection is an hour wasted not moving Marines, training assaults, or standing alert. The ducted-fan VTOL design of V-BAT is constructed to the peculiarities of amphibious aviation – vertical take-off by a relatively small area, wing-borne cruise of longer distances, then vertical recovery – making deck operations straightforward and yet extending sensors outward.
The details are motivated by shipboard bottlenecks. V-BAT has a footprint of 6 m x 6 m and can be launched and recovered in such a small area, and its small airframe, 2.74 m long, with a wingspan of 2.96 m, is capable of accommodating stowage and quick handling on crowded ships. Payload is classified as 11.3 kg, so this is significant since mission set is not fixed to any given camera: the standard is an electro-optical/infrared day-night observation, with radar options such as SAR and other electronic payloads providing a wider range of options on what a small detachment can capture when weather, range or spectrum activity make the situation harder.
This type of system begins to transform the manner in which a MEU handles its time by endurance. Published performance incorporates a maximum of 10 hours stamina at approximately 45 knots and a standard load on board, and a cruising speed of approximately 98 km/h and a maximum dash speed of 157 km/h. The aircraft has a 288cc two-stroke EFI engine that can operate on heavy fuel, such as JP-8, or a gasoline-oil mixture, and thus can be flown to the reality of logistics of forward naval operations, where a fuel decision and discipline in supply are not details but operations. A single operator normally drives the system through a Kutta Tech ground control station, with a his primary focus being autonomous flight and automated transitions an essential workload avoider when the deck is in motion, the wind changing direction, and recoveries must occur repeatedly.
Another clue of the bigger problem that amphibious forces are addressing presented in that deck footage is that they are feeling and moving in long distances simultaneously. The distributed littoral operations and changes in the design of the forces have put a premium on moving collection to the edge with the signatures being contained. That context makes a shipboard VTOL drone less of a “nice-to-have” and more a device to keep the decisions made by the MEU at quality levels without increasing its manned aviation workload.
The broader track record of experimentation of V-BAT justifies the reason why it is getting more than a niche shipboard gadget. Shield AI used the involvement of the aircraft in Project Convergence Capstone 5, in which the aircraft participated in a challenging training regime and was characterized as functioning against active jamming. The planned scope of employment was summarized by the company president, Brandon Tseng: “V-BAT is designed to operate at every echelon within an Army division, executing the full spectrum of UAS missions,” which makes it a system to be expanded to a scope that supports small units all the way up to supporting a wider variety of operations like scalable collection and targeting.
Another fact in the shipboard image can be ignored but is important to actual incorporation: contractors were on deck. Initial welding of new unmanned systems at sea is usually supported by specialized technical assistance teams as units solidify maintenance procedures, shipboard, electromagnetic discipline, and those little things called “gotchas”, which can only manifest in salt water and limited schedules. The payoff of uniformed self-sufficiency in the long game is the short-term reward of accelerated learning within the training cycle of the MEU.
Finally, the importance of a V-BAT in an amphibious deck is not that the MEU discovered a new drone. The reason is that the MEU was able to show how to incorporate the persistent sensing into the normal amphibious processes, with no additional flight-deck bandwidth used to support the lift, rehearsal and response.
