Flight Safety Technologies continues to develop its patented UNICORN™ collision avoidance technology for the purposes of Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), also called Drones.
 The company has become aware of a growing interest on the part of NASA, FAA, the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Defense regarding the proliferation of the current and planned uses of UAVs. Should UAVs be operated outside of the confines of restricted air space, they would present a risk of collision with private and commercial aircraft, thus requiring some level of
collision avoidance capability.
In this video, a small military UAV can be seen in a near-collision with a large commercial jet. The origin of this video is unknown, but has been widely distributed on the internet and came to us from several sources. The title provided in the first frame ("Luna at Kabul") suggests that the UAV is a small German-made UAV ("Luna") used for reconnaissance and surveillance in Afghanistan. In the last frame, the camera is aimed at the ground, indicating that the UAV is in a nose-up configuraton, most likely resulting from the downwash induced by the passing jet. Notice that in that final frame, many of the pixels have been blanked out, probably for military security purposes. It's not likely that the UAV recovered from the incident. However, because the Luna is a remotely-operated vehicle, the data continously streamed from the vehicle to the operators was preserved.
Our company has had preliminary discussions with the United States Air Force through Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, OH regarding the possible application of our UNICORN™ technology for the Global Hawk UAV. Flight Safety Technologies seeks to develop UNICORN™ for this and other unmanned air vehicles.
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