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University of North Dakota Receives UAV Grants

Posted on: Thursday, 4 August 2005, 18:00 CDT

Aug. 4--UND's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences on Tuesday received two grants for a total of $270,000 to study unmanned aerial vehicles in the context of national air space.

School Dean Bruce Smith made the announcement Wednesday at a meeting in the Alerus Center with state and local officials to discuss Base Realignment and Closure developments with Grand Forks Air Force Base and Fargo.

The grants for $140,000 and $130,000 came from the Federal Aviation Administration's Center of Excellence for General Aviation of which the school is a member.

Graduate students and faculty will research the ability of UAVs to sense, recognize and avoid other airplanes within national airspace. And, how size and speed of UAVs mixes in with general aviation standards.

Smith said that most of the UAV performance data available applies to military environment because they have been primarily used in combat areas such as Iraq and Afghanistan.

Some of the scenarios they would analyze include the logistics of landing a UAV in at Grand Forks International and how it would interact with commercial traffic.

"It wouldn't be a problem," smith said. "It's just a matter of developing procedures."

To land a UAV in one of the three runways of Grand Forks air Force Base, for instance, air traffic controllers would have to know how fast, how big and how heavy the airplane is, he said.

"Those questions don't exist in the combat arena but they do exist in national air space," Smith said.

'FLYING LAB' KICKS OFF NOV. 1: Bruce Smith, dean of UND's John D. Odegard School of Aerospace Sciences, said that the contract for NASA's DC-8 "Flying lab" which will be operated out of Grand Forks Air Force Base, kicks off Nov. 1, which is the start of fiscal year 2006.

That time frame coincides with the base's deadline to complete runway construction and return the flying tankers to Grand Forks from Fargo and Fairchild Air Force Base, Wash.

"If the runway is complete, the flying lab will be here," Smith said.

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Copyright (c) 2005, Grand Forks Herald, N.D.

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Source: Grand Forks Herald (Grand Forks, N.D.)

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