After several years of gestation and a concentrated 3-y development program, the Mark 1 Aerosonde passed all aspects of its operational trial by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in January and February 1998. This has been followed by a series of operations in Canada, the USA, Australia and Taiwan. In August 1998 the Aerosonde became the first autonomous aircraft, and the smallest, to cross the North Atlantic Ocean. Our experiences from these operations have been used to develop the Mark 2 Aerosonde, which made its first flight in September 1999. We shall describe the characteristics of this aircraft and our planned development through to Mark 4.
A major requirement for the move to operations is the establishment of a suitable infrastructure for Aerosonde deployment and operation. We shall present our vision and plans for a robotic airline operating from a distributed set of launch and recovery sites, with a global command centre supported by regional command centres as required.
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