Mariner UAV completes wind tunnel testing.

General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) has successfully completed wind tunnel testing on a model of its Mariner unmanned aircraft. GA-ASI conducted aerodynamic testing of the Mariner airframe to support the selection of Team Mariner UAS, an initiative with advanced electronics systems integrator Lockheed Martin, as the solution for the US Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) programme.

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The Mariner design is a derivative of the company's operationally proven turboprop Predator B unmanned aircraft that has been optimised for the unique demands of the Navy, assuring a low-cost and low-risk solution to meet the service's needs.

The goal of the testing was to validate key metrics related to the design performance of the Mariner aircraft.

The Mariner wind tunnel testing will help reduce programme risks by providing additional data to improve model fidelity, instead of relying on computational analyses alone. It also provided the opportunity to correlate key performance data to analytical tools such as computational fluid dynamics and to calibrate various analytical methods. In addition, the testing enabled a specific set of configuration changes to be evaluated economically, at a faster pace, and for important performance sensitivities to be generated.

Designed to provide unmanned persistent Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) over littoral and broad ocean areas of interest, the Mariner UAS will provide for planning, control, tasking, collection, processing, analysis, and dissemination of actionable information in support of the US Navy.