Breaking Defense:

The Army is seeking industry input to help it figure out how best to deploy intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance payloads on very high altitude drones, said Mark Kitz, the service’s lead buyer of such technology.

The focus is on “programs at high altitude above 60,000 feet and how we can get after stratospheric sensing technologies, and then how we build sensor technologies that are resilient to this future environment,” Kitz, Army program executive officer for intelligence, electronic warfare and sensors, said Monday at the Association of the US Army’s (AUSA) annual conference in Washington, D.C. “We have a lot of investments in building resilience and technology.”

In particular, he added, this involves navigation warfare, assured positioning, navigation and timing (PNT) and “our ability to have trusted space and trusted sensors in our future.”

His call for outside ideas comes in the wake of the rather ignominious end of the service’s last high altitude drone test in August — when the ultra-endurance drone known as the Zephyr was left to languish in the sky for weeks until brought down by what the Army called an “unexpected termination of [its] flight.” As a result, the next test of the spindly Zephyr, made by Airbus US, has been delayed until sometime next year.

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