War Machines
Southeastern Alberta’s robotic vehicle industry is gearing up to face its biggest challenge to date: the outbreak of peace
by Scott Messenger
In grey waters off South Africa’s Cape of Good Hope German warships FGS Hamburg and FGS Koeln train guns on a small, black motorboat, ominously coffin-shaped. It plies the chop at an easy 65 kilometres per hour, quickly closing the gap between it and the naval vessels. Of course, at just five metres in length, it should be no match for armoured ships longer than a soccer field and carrying crews of over 200. But on Oct. 12, 2000, 17 American sailors died aboard the USS Cole, harboured at Aden, Yemen, when suicide bombers sidled up to the destroyer in a little boat loaded with explosives. These days, no one risks what’s known in military circles as an asymmetric threat.
The guns crackle, dispatching a burst of 27-millimetre shells at the rate of 1,800 rounds per minute. A second later, half a dozen waterspouts outline the coffin boat, leaving it and its unknown cargo to draw nearer. Again the guns fire, sending up more fountains. This time, though, the black vessel slows, then stops, bobbing helplessly. Celebratory shouts cut short as the frame freezes.
“That’s good,” says Spencer Fraser. He closes the video file and the image of the neutralized threat disappears from the boardroom screen. “That’s a sale.”
It turns out that the Germans, after those training exercises conducted last February, will need to replace their kill. Otherwise known as a Hammerhead, it’s one of the latest unmanned, remotely controlled vehicles from Meggitt Training Systems Canada, where Fraser, a 20-year veteran of the Canadian Navy, is general manager. Hammerheads run about $60,000 each, but, before taking a hit, they’ll analyze misses and send constructive criticism to the controller, making them money well spent when a couple of guys with a jet-ski and a shoulder-launched rocket try piercing your defences.
Currently, such motivators have Meggitt, a branch of British parent Meggitt PLC, positioned as a top Canadian producer of unmanned vehicle systems (UVS). Headquartered in an industrial park in Medicine Hat, it brings around $15 million annually into a region already sitting pretty, economically speaking, atop almost half of Canada’s natural gas wells. But, despite also manufacturing unmanned air (UAVs) and ground (UGVs) vehicles for the United States, Europe and Japan, Fraser’s frustrated. Those wells may partly explain why support for research and development doesn’t come easy in his industry. “It’s my assessment that the feds see more deserving places in Canada to spend,” he says, carefully omitting the curses he occasionally tosses into conversations. “In Alberta, that’s kind of sour grapes.”
Medicine Hat’s Canadian Centre for Unmanned Vehicle Systems (CCUVS) was recently formed to address those concerns, not only for Meggitt, but for other local industry players. About 70 companies spread between this city of 57,000 and Calgary, 300 kilometres northwest along the Trans-Canada, currently contribute to an almost exclusively military UVS market, building wireless control systems, designing software, and manufacturing parts and the vehicles themselves. The civilian sector, however, has its own jobs too dull, dirty and dangerous (the three Ds, in UVS circles) for human beings. And that domestic market, says Fraser, remains untapped at our peril. “If we wait another two years, forget it. Someone else will do it. Our view is, frig, we’re right here,” says the former officer, easing into colloquialism. “Let’s get on with it.”
This is Don Matthews’ thinking as well. After all, by CCUVS estimates, the worldwide unmanned air sector alone could be worth as much as $34 billion by 2011.
Matthews, the former head of Aviation Alberta and CCUVS president and chief executive, might seem familiar: his picture graced the front pages of newspapers across Canada on Jan. 25, 1991, as the first Gulf War was winding down. The first CF-18 foray into Iraq, flying cover for American bombers, had just successfully accomplished its mission under his command. Compared to that, and to a 30-year military career that also included leading the mid-1990s Canadian peacekeeping mission in Haiti, working to build up the national robotic vehicle industry, he claims, is easy. Relatively.
CCUVS is located in Medicine Hat’s former airport terminal, a tiny, flat-top, brick building about 50 years old, Matthews guesses, given dates on forgotten paperwork he found after moving in last summer with his staff of two. Sitting at a desk positioned where an air traffic controller would have once monitored the rudimentary computers and scopes of early commercial aviation, Matthews describes CCUVS’s civilian sector focus as similarly pioneering, even if unmanned vehicles have been conducting military surveillance and reconnaissance for decades.
“I don’t think there’s anybody in the aerospace and defence business that doesn’t see the writing on the wall,” says Matthews. “Eventually the Americans are going to reduce their deployment to Iraq and maybe even Afghanistan, so there will be a lot of people looking for other things to do with their unmanned air and ground vehicles.” From a business standpoint, then, he says, “You don’t want to create a situation where anything we do has a critical path where the military has to be involved.”
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