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Design Methodology For Low Speed High Altitude Long Endurance Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Aaron Altman

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Faculty Publications

High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's) are increasingly being considered to perform a wide range of tasks. Recent years have seen greater value of UAV's in the military reconnaissance arena, first in the Persian Gulf war, with the use of small UAV's, and more recently over Bosnia with medium sized UAV's.

The NASA ERAST program uses HALE UAV's for environmental sensing and monitoring. The military has investigated using HALE UAV's for Theater Ballistic Missile defense, as well as general battlefield reconnaissance. Proposals have been made to use HALE UAV's for communications relay, long term surveillance (with a …