A six-man team at Boeing Co.’s sprawling Huntington Beach operation is working on a little-known unmanned, underwater vehicle program that could reshape deep-sea search and exploration.
The 18.5-foot Echo Ranger—a one-of-a-kind yellow vessel that weighs half a ton and resembles an oblong torpedo—can navigate depths of 10,000 feet for as many as three days without a recharge of its lithium polymer batteries. It’s designed for the commercial, education and military sectors and uses sonar technology and sensors to scan and map the ocean floor.
Boeing doesn’t disclose operating costs for the vessel, but it’s believed to be cost-prohibitive for most commercial uses at this point. Most of the Echo Ranger’s limited operations have been in the Gulf of Mexico, where it has captured images of the sea floor for gas and oil exploration and done examinations of rigging systems.
Potential Applications
The team in Huntington Beach remains engaged on the project because the potential applications are vast, from detecting and differentiating trace levels of chemical compounds in the water to finding shipwrecks and tracking submerged enemy positions.
“Most people don’t know these things really exist—I think awareness is building of what they’re capable of,” said Fred Sheldon, who runs advanced mission development for unmanned underwater vehicles, commonly referred to as UUVs, as a program manager at Boeing’s Advanced Technology Programs.
The use of UUVs gained prominence in 2011 as they played a key role in locating the black box of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean nearly two years earlier, killing all 288 passengers and crew. The ongoing search for Malaysian Airlines Flight 370, which vanished March 8 en route to Beijing from Kuala Lumpur, has increased awareness of the technology, which has evolved at a much slower pace than other automated systems.
“There’s a desire to use more unmanned systems, especially in deeper water because you can’t get down there very easily,” Sheldon said. “If we can increase the awareness and make the technology more available, we can do a better job of assessing what’s happening in our oceans, not only biologically but chemically and geologically.”
Catalina-Bound
Officials at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will get a closer look next week when the Echo Ranger departs off the northern coast of Catalina Island to run a series of tests for the federal agency, which monitors climate, weather systems, coastal restoration and marine commerce.
Boeing has partnered with NOAA’s Southwest Fisheries Science Center in La Jolla on a mission to measure water quality, temperature and salinity.
The Echo Ranger will be equipped with the same sensors and cameras the federal department uses for its fish surveys, an integral part of establishing national fishing quotas.
It can analyze numerous data sets simultaneously, boosting efficiencies and doing more comprehensive research, according to Boeing. The UUV survey is a first for both Boeing and NOAA.
“It’s really a proof of concept at this point,” Sheldon said. “They’ve never done it this way … we’ve never done it this way.”
Rockwell Legacy
The UUV program originated in Anaheim with legacy technologies gained through Boeing’s 1996 acquisition of Seal Beach-based Rockwell International’s aerospace and defense unit.
“That’s where all this heritage comes from,” Sheldon said. “It was founded and has been maintained in Southern California the whole time.”
Chicago-based Boeing has eliminated jobs in recent years as part of a companywide cost-cutting campaign to improve efficiencies and restructure operations, including selling unneeded real estate. The company remains Orange County’s fourth largest employer, with about 6,800 local workers (see related OC 50 entry for Alex Lopez in Special Report, starting on page 15).
Boeing made its name in the aerospace industry but has had a long history developing underwater vehicles and equipment before the Rockwell acquisitions. The work has included assessing hydrodynamic shapes for submarines, devising countermeasures for torpedo attacks, and developing acoustic targets that mimic enemy submarines in training exercises.
In 2007, it concluded the final tests of its Long-term Mine Reconnaissance System at the U.S. Navy’s Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center in the Bahamas, demonstrating that a Navy attack-submarine had the capability of launching an unmanned undersea vehicle and retrieving it with a robotic arm system. The vessel was developed to survey, detect and gather data on underwater threats, such as mines.
“Shadowing”
In 1999, the Navy’s Unmanned Undersea Vehicle program office selected Boeing to design the vessel, which performs several complex maneuvers, including “shadowing,” or operating alongside the host submarine.
The underwater vehicles programs are managed by Boeing’s St. Louis-based Defense, Space & Security division, which has about $33 billion in annual revenue and makes military equipment, systems and aircraft. The unit employs about 58,000 companywide.
Boeing is among a handful of companies developing large-scale, intelligent UUVs in a developing segment still in its infancy. Others include Bluefin Robotics Corp., a Massachusetts unit of Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio; Bethesda, Md.-based Lockheed Martin Corp. and Norway-based Kongsberg Gruppen ASA, which operates a maritime unit in Irvine near John Wayne Airport.
