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2023-05-01

MQ-9B SeaGuardian: Offering Highest-quality Situational Awareness

The security challenges facing responsible governments get more serious by the day. What’s more, as each one deepens, new ones crop up. Military operations, maritime domain awareness, intelligence gathering, border security, customs enforcement, search and rescue – each of these missions and many others require resources, training, technical sophistication, and experience. Fortunately, the tools for tackling them also are improving as never before.

One core example is with remotely piloted aircraft, which are handling these missions and many others in the 21st century as fully mature, multi-mission providers of capabilities that nothing else can offer. The MQ-9B SkyGuardian family of aircraft built by San Diego-based General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. is defining new possibilities for offering situational awareness and then, action.

Military commanders, intelligence officials, coast guardsmen, and others don’t want to search, or guess, or estimate – they need to know… now. They need to know what is transpiring at a given crossroads, or over a key patch of ocean, or within an important waterway, such as a strait. This kind of situational awareness then enables them to decide, from a position of advantage, exactly what steps are correct for a given challenge.

Medium Altitude, Long Endurance

With an endurance of 30 hours or more, depending on its configuration, as well as its onboard systems and a growing range of sophisticated payloads, SkyGuardian and its sibling SeaGuardian provide situational awareness as nothing else can. When aircraft work in teams, they effectively deliver nonstop surveillance; nothing can happen in an area of interest without being observed.

But SeaGuardian isn’t only watching what transpires as a normal overhead observer might with the naked eye. The MQ-9B does so in any weather, day or night, through clouds, mist, smoke, fog, or other environmental conditions. And the aircraft and its supporting systems make possible a high degree of fidelity and precision that go well beyond traditional surveillance.

One key example is Optix, which provides users with high-quality actionable intelligence. Artificial intelligence and machine learning power the delivery of sophisticated insights at network speed, presenting human users with a degree of awareness not available any other way.

For example, SeaGuardian can use its onboard sensors to detect a vessel and then assess whether the ship is broadcasting on the Automatic Information System, also known by the shorthand AIS. When smugglers or others try to hide from detection, they sometimes turn AIS off. They also might try to broadcast false information: claiming on AIS that their illicit oil tanker actually is a smaller and unremarkable fishing vessel. MQ-9B isn’t fooled.

A key component to achieving the highest level of situational awareness is a module called the System for Tasking and Real-Time Exploitation, which can be integrated into Optix. This lets MQ-9 operators easily assign tasks to the aircraft and automates the process of identifying and classifying the objects they detect. Optix and STARE also correlate live inputs from an operational MQ-9B as it flies its mission along with intelligence from commercial satellites and other sources. All this is fused into an easily shared common operational picture.

Sustaining situational awareness like this pays untold dividends. The importance to navies and intelligence agencies can’t be overstated, but it goes well beyond them. For instance, coast guard agencies can use real-time intel to monitor and then crack down on illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing – another growing challenge of this era. Lifesaving authorities can eliminate the “search” from the old construction of “search and rescue.”

With a SeaGuardian already on station, the aircraft can hear a radioed distress call in real time and pinpoint the vessel of origin. Controllers can use the onboard sensors to assess the state of the ship calling for help. Is it on fire? Are its lifeboats in the water? And then send help precisely where it is needed.

Operationally Proven

This isn’t theoretical. It’s been proven many times over in the millions of hours of operational use of remotely piloted aircraft, including MQ-9B and its predecessors. Government officials of all kinds, with many different missions, have come to depend on the situational awareness they can only get via these remotely operated systems.

And it doesn’t only involve monitoring live events. For example, SeaGuardian and SkyGuardian can provide insights about changes over time. The aircraft’s onboard sensors can detect whether a patch of ground has been disturbed since the last time it was observed, suggesting whether or not people have passed through. Or the aircraft can map long stretches of terrain, or road, or pipeline to help assess what has changed or remained the same in the time since the last survey. Specialised payloads increase the variety of these kinds of operations.

The support systems mean that operators can get key mission insights to exactly where they’re needed so that supervisors or officials can use them to greatest effect. So, taking a coast guard scenario as an example, an aircraft hears the distress call first, and the coast guard can simultaneously watch the vessel in distress as it coordinates the ships and aircraft it’s sending for the rescue. The captain of a rescue vessel approaching the ship in need can see how it’s doing and what manner of rescue is required before actually sighting the stricken vessel with their own eyes.

This kind of situational awareness – constant, precise, rich, available at any echelon, as appropriate – only comes from the foremost remotely piloted aircraft and the most sophisticated supporting system. It’s what sets the MQ-9B SeaGuardian and SkyGuardian apart from everything else .

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