A small red and white aircraft zipped through the air above Vicksburg Municipal Airport Friday afternoon.

A distant whine could be heard from the aircraft’s three rotors as it flew back and forth doing a mock mapping exercise under the watchful eye of four pilots from the U.S. Army Engineer Research Development Center.

The pilots spent the week at the airport learning to fly the BirdsEyeView FireFLY6 Pro Unmanned Aircraft System. Made almost entirely of Styrofoam, the craft has a flight time of up to an hour and a top speed of  35 knots or about 40 miles per hour and will be used by ERDC’s Environmental Lab for a variety of mapping projects.

“Our crew has been out here since Wednesday learning the ground station control system, which is the control system that actually operates the bird,” said Jenny Laird, the Environmental Lab’s UAS Lead. “They are going through different flight scenarios to learn to fly in manual mode and then to fly in autopilot mode and learn the safety features.”

When in manual mode, the craft is flown using a PlayStation 4 controller, but during mapping exercises the drone can be programmed to fly autonomously.

“The last couple days what we have been mostly doing is getting our muscle reflexes and piloting skills down, learning how the aircraft flies and getting used to how that feels. Just learning how to do maneuvers and seeing how everything works,” said Robert Boyd, a research biologist who was one of the four pilots learning to fly the drone. “When we first started training, it was all manual so we would know how to recover the aircraft if there was a problem. Then we transitioned over to autonomous flight and now everything is pretty much automatic.”

Various different cameras can be attached to the bottom of the craft and they can be used to 3D map areas, detect the health and species of plants, use a thermal imagery camera to detect heat and cold and more.

“We will be using them in the future for different types of projects for both civil and military research,” Laird said. “We can look at grasslands or hardwood forestry reforestation areas. We can look at coastlines. We map any type of area where they are looking for specific locations for things. Can also use them to map areas like the airport to give the customer an overall areal view of their space.”

The lab’s UAS team previously used a quad-copter that was limited to about 20 minutes of airtime. With the new FireFLY system, which when fully equipped cost about $30,000, Laird said they will get “more bang for our buck” due to the extended airtime.

“It takes off like a regular quad-copter,” she said. “Once it gets in the air it transitions and turns itself it a fix wing and flies more like an airplane. It gives us where we can cover more area. This one can cover up to 500 acres in a one-hour flight.”

The UAS team went on three different weeklong mapping missions last year and Laird said the new system will likely be used starting in the spring.

“Normally we fly in the spring/summer time because that is when the weather is a lot better,” Laird said. “A lot of times when we fly, we want to get in what is called a solar window, times between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m., because it gives us the most light to actually collect the data.”