ScanEagle No. 678 was built in Southwest Washington to be the next best thing to invisible.
It’s definitely in the spotlight now. Insitu announced Friday that it has donated the unmanned aircraft, which participated in a widely publicized rescue mission in April 2009, to The Museum of Flight in Seattle.
The Boeing subsidiary is based in Bingen but has several other sites up and down the Columbia River, including White Salmon, Stevenson and Vancouver.
The aircraft was part of a widely publicized hostage situation in April 2009. The U.S. Navy used it to rescue Capt. Richard Phillips, who was held by Somali pirates after the hijacking of his ship, Maersk Alabama.
It was one of several ScanEagles that provided real-time intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance imagery that aided rescuers.
“The fact that this particular aircraft is a veteran of a significant, recent mission is especially valuable,” chief curator Dan Hagedorn said in a museum press release. “It will help museum visitors relate to the headlines of today.”
A ScanEagle can be launched from a Navy ship with a compressed-air catapult. It cruises at about 55 mph at an altitude of thousands of feet, so the people under observation have no idea it’s there. Darkness doesn’t provide much cover for those being monitored, since Scan-Eagles can be equipped with an infrared night-vision system.
This ScanEagle is on temporary display in the museum lobby. Next year, it will be permanently exhibited with other surveillance aircraft in the museum’s Great Gallery.
It’s only 44 pounds, so, Hagedorn said, visitors “will see in a glance how aerial surveillance has progressed from the massive Blackbird of the 1960s to the diminutive ScanEagle of today.”– Tom Vogt
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