Coyote was first tested in 2014 during the Atlantic hurricane season (Credit: NOAA) Flying manned aircraft into the carnage of a hurricane has given researchers new means of studying tropical storms, beyond what can be learned from the ground or satellites. But do you know what could be even more fruitful (and safer) than that? Sending in aircraft without anyone on board. This is the objective of researchers at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), who have just completed a successful test flight of their Coyote Unmanned Aircraft System designed to retrieve important data from the eye of the storm to improve hurricane forecasting. Using unmanned vehicles to inspect hurricanes is something we have seen explored by government agencies before. In 2012, NASA sent a pair of Global Hawk UAVs on a month-long mission to study hurricanes off the east coast of the US. In 2013, an imaginative professor from the University of Florida developed small drones designed to actually be swept up with the hurricane, to gather data on the strength and path of the storm while swirling madly about within. Developed by defense technology company Raytheon, the Coyote is a small unmanned aircraft launched from the […]
