Coast Guard Demos New UAS

The Coast Guard completed the second of three planned shipboard demonstrations of unmanned aircraft system capabilities aboard Coast Guard Cutter Bertholf. These exercises are part of an ongoing effort to explore UAS capabilities and shipboard handling techniques. The Coast Guard is using knowledge gained from these demonstrations to inform a future cutter-based UAS acquisition project. During the two-week deployment, the UAS demonstration team operated a ScanEagle UAS for more than 90 hours of flight time and aided in the interdiction of nearly 600 kilograms of cocaine -- the first Coast Guard interdiction conducted with the support of an embarked UAS asset.