What are the possible operational scenarios?

Maritime patrol and general surveillance

Monitoring mission with day- and night-time operations for detection and tracking of vessels and or detection of oil spills. This type of mission requires a long endurance RPAS with LOS and BLOS capabilities.

Marine pollution (monitoring and response support)

RPAS services can support response operations by monitoring the evolution of the extent of the spill. To do so, communication between all the oil spill response teams (aircraft and ships) must be maintained during the operations.

Monitoring illegal fishing, anti-drug trafficking or other illegal activities

As a complementary task to maritime patrolling, the long-range cameras on the RPAS allow for illegal activities to be detected on vessel deck.

Emissions monitoring

The RPAS can carry gas sensors in order to measure the sulphur content in the plume emitted by the ship and therefore estimate the sulphur content of the fuel burnt by the vessel.

Monitoring port activities

The RPAS can be deployed to support the day-to-day monitoring of port operations and rapid response to pollution incidents in the large port area.

Search and rescue

With LOS and BLOS capabilities, the aircraft operates towards vessel, life-raft or boat detection, hence the necessity of a search pattern navigation (with automatic target following and flight path adjustment to maintain the sight of the target).