Toll Aviation wrapped up a demonstration campaign for the Shield AI MQ-35A VBAT last month following three months of testing, flying, and operating the vehicle in a variety of conditions around the country.
The demonstration campaign, which arose from a teaming agreement between the two companies signed in August last year, was aimed at introducing the capability to the Australian civil and military markets.
To enable that, Toll offered full type endorsement courses to clients with a genuine capacity and need, according to Toll Aviation General Manager Colin Gunn.
“We offered to train up their senior operators and technicians and let them gain experience with the platform and understand its strengths and weaknesses,” he explained.
Toll Aviation has spent upwards of one million US dollars on the campaign so far, which has seen officials from Defence, state police forces and other government agencies trained to operate the MQ-35A VBAT - according to the company’s submission to the Senate Select Committee on Australia’s Disaster Reliance.
The company made the submission after it was invited to Canberra to brief the committee on VBAT’s capabilities for civil disaster management and response. VBAT, Toll Aviation told the committee, could be a valuable whole of government asset beyond just that mission set.
“When required for contingencies, these [VBATs] can pivot from performing their primary mission to delivering exceptional whole of government [value for money],” Gunn said.
The proposal put forward by Toll Aviation is similar to one the company submitted to the 2023 Defence Strategic Review (DSR), where it advocated for a whole of government rotary wing program.
While Toll sees VBAT having a lot to offer to civil operators, the Australian Defence Force (ADF) and Australian Border Force (ABF) are key markets for the capability, Andrew Crowe, Toll Aviation’s Program Manager for the VBAT campaign, explained.
With an eye to those customers, Toll Aviation integrated unique aspects of both agencies’ missions into the demonstration campaign, Crowe explained. This included a series of test flights in Defence controlled airspace off HMAS Stirling from aboard the decommissioned Armidale class patrol boat Sentinel, as well as flights from land facilities in the vicinity of defence establishments.
Wayne Condon, Head of Toll Uncrewed Systems and the Chief Pilot, said that the V-BAT has been fully certified for operations by the Civil Aviation Safety Authority (CASA), which is the operating basis for most of the flight operations conducted to date in Australia.
Condon clarified that whilst the Defence Aviation Safety Authority has not yet certified V-BAT operations, it does have familiarity with the product through the approval process to conduct embarked operations in military airspace. The V-BAT does have full U.S. military technical and operational airworthiness approvals.
While that isn’t the same as fully certifying the MQ-35A VBAT with DASA, Crowe said it should reduce the time that process takes, assuming a defence customer is forthcoming.
That, however, isn’t a certainty, with Gunn empathising that Toll Aviation isn’t trying to compete with the systems selected under Project Def 129 – formally the separate Projects Land 129 and Sea 129 – but instead to complement them.
Gunn emphasised the speed at which VBATs could be delivered to Australia if a customer was found. Shield AI’s production line, he explained, is hot and would enable delivery of new customer-owned systems within six to eight weeks of them being ordered.
Currently, approximately 30 units are produced each month.
This small gap, he said, could be filled using leased systems operated by Toll Aviation while a customer’s crews and maintainers are trained up.
This rapid delivery would be enabled by the teaming agreement between Toll Aviation and Shield AI, which also covers the ongoing integration of Australian payloads onto the system.
In April, Shield Announced that it had bought Melbourne-based Sentient Vision systems, with an eye towards making its ViDAR optical sensor system – since evolved into the Sentient Observer product – a standard offering for VBAT users worldwide.
ADM understands that several other Australian payload manufacturers are in various stages of discussions around possible integration of their systems aboard VBAT.
“A couple of companies in Melbourne and Brisbane make world class payloads, sensors and software, and Shield AI are genuinely open to putting best payloads on VBAT,” Gunn said.
While the departure of VBAT from Australian shores marks the end of this phase of the test campaign, Toll Aviation is expecting to receive another - more advanced - version for testing in Australia later this year.
Gunn also left the door open to components of the system - and perhaps the whole system - one day being built in Australia. The 2024 US National Defence Industry Strategy, he explained, encouraged US companies to go offshore and find trusted partners with which to spread their manufacturing base.
This development, Gunn said, had reduced how many systems would be needed before elements of production could be brought to Australia.