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20 In conversation | Julian Hasinski to be extensively re-engineered. The airframe had been built from 4 mm carbon, which was the standard formula material at the time, he says. “We went back to the manufacturer, DPS Composites, and got them to make it in 1.5 mm carbon‚” he says. “We then took a four-cylinder engine from a Banshee, epoxied it in a plywood former, put in a Banshee single-axis gyro and fuel tank, put the Voodoo lid on, and it was almost bang on 75 kg.” The chosen flight test venue was a farm in Kent, UK, that belonged to the former managing director of Meggitt, Rob Davies, who also kept a collection of historic aircraft there. After a phone call to the Civil Aviation Authority, Davies took off in a North American Harvard chase plane, followed by the Voodoo from the Banshee catapult with Meggitt chief test pilot Wilf Steinhorst at the remote controls. “It flew like a dream‚” Hasinski says. “We just did a few circuits with the Harvard watching and videoing, brought it down on its parachute safely and recovered it.” Using manned aircraft A motorcycle dispatch rider got the tape to the board meeting in time to save the project – and Hasinski’s job. He argues that the use of manned chase aircraft would have been a great help to the now de-funded Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment (Astrea) programme to integrate UAVs into civil airspace. Astrea was held back by the project leadership’s refusal to use chase aircraft because, Hasinski says, “They wanted to show that their aircraft didn’t have to be led around the sky.” The advantage of a manned chase aircraft is that provides ‘eyes and ears’ on the spot so that air traffic control can be informed the instant anything goes wrong. Hasinski likens it to the man who had to walk in front of the first cars waving a red flag. “My contention is they should have had the ‘aircraft with the red flag’ in front of every UAV to get it flying and operating. We would have had acceptance in airspace far more readily had we done that.” The current focus of his work at Raytheon is not on unmanned systems as such, but includes cyber-security and electrical power and power conversion technologies, which have direct applications to them, particularly to electric aircraft. He also mentors students at Cranfield University, giving them projects that will test them in autonomy, control, high-end automation and artificial intelligence. One of these is a 12-rotor ‘polycopter’, which is designed to change direction by direct movement without banking or turning in any plane, rather like the 3D mapping drone in the film Prometheus . “If you talk to military guys, they say something like that would be awesome,” he says. “There are only a few patents that can actually achieve that.” In a project handed over to Essex University, a team has put together a suite of cameras on a dodecahedral frame to generate a 3D point cloud, and divers tow it under water to map areas of the seabed and harbour structures. A video of this proof-of-concept device in action was shown at Raytheon’s annual technology day in November 2017. “It will fly eventually, but for it to have utility we need to know that its output is going to be of some use,” he says. However, he is already thinking beyond that and looking to rack up achievements in more electric aircraft in the final decade or so of his career. “The minute a sports broadcaster is transmitting 4 Pi steradian 3D TV from my polycopter – or even if they start to think about developing it – I’ll be moving on to the next thing,” he says. December/January 2018 | Unmanned Systems Technology As Raytheon UK’s technical director, Julian Hasinski is responsible for technical governance, technology planning and road mapping, innovation, intellectual property and patents. He joined the company in 2015 from Airbus Defence & Space UK, where he was the senior expert for unmanned and autonomous systems. Before joining Airbus in 2003 (when it was called EADS), he worked for Meggitt, where he developed the autopilot for the Voodoo high-speed target vehicle and saw it through a challenging flight test programme. Before that he ran his own business, Aerotech Engineering, which he started in 1995 with co-director John Cudbertson, focusing on the application of computational fluid dynamics to various aircraft, power stations and, in particular, racecars. This included wind tunnel testing of the standard low-level design for IndyCars and some Formula Three work. They also analysed engine inlet airflows for Nissan Primera touring cars and the Citroen Zara World Rally car, as well as external aerodynamics on the Ascari A410 Le Mans Prototype. Julian Hasinski