Angela Crawford
Kyneton Aero Club is flight testing world-leading Australian-made surveillance technology out of Kyneton Airfield.
Pilot Warren Canning has been conducting development trials of the intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance equipment for Ascent Vision Technologies Australia.
“The CM234 ISR gimbal (a pivoted support that allows rotation of an object) is the smallest, lightest, four-axis stabilised ISR gimbal ever produced,” Mr Canning told the Express.
“It can turn and look and be fully stabilised when we’re bumping around in rough air.
“It can be used in real time to surveil or target something, or used to post-analyse that data.”
Mr Canning said the program started out as a Defence Innovation Hub project, a Department of Defence initiative to fund innovative Australian technology that may have an application to Defence capability.
“Relatively early on in the development program, it showed such promise that it actually ended up in an acquisition project within Defence,” he said.
“So it is going into service with the Australian Army.
“In addition, BAE Systems, which is a huge international defence company, has also chosen this particular ISR gimbal and I expect, subject to export approvals, that it will get widespread adoption from our allies, because it is that good.”
While the new technology is primarily destined for use on remotely piloted aircraft, Mr Canning said it was more practical to undertake the flight trials on a crewed platform.
“It was much easier to do all the trials on an aircraft that was crewed because we then had the flexibility of getting airspace approvals,” he said.
Mr Canning and fellow pilot Mike Bourke, the aero club’s chief flying instructor, flew out of Kyneton, all around Melbourne and at a ground range north of Kyneton with a range of targets set up on it.
Mr Canning is an industrial strategy advisor on guided weapons, space and hypersonics for French international defence and aerospace company, Thales, and a former chairman of Defence Innovation.
He worked as project lead on Defence Innovation’s development of the wireless Non-Intrusive Flight Test Instrumentation system, or NIFTI, which won the prestigious Avalon 2019 National Innovation Award at the Avalon Airshow.
“We did all the developmental flying for that, from about 2016 to 2019, out of Kyneton,” he said.
“That was a collaboration between the Air Force, the company I was chair of and the Defence, Science and Technology Organisation where I’d spent most of my professional career in aerospace and defence research.
“We did the initial flight testing out of here and then at RAAF Edinburgh, and later RAAF Williamtown for supersonic testing.”
Mr Canning is also a member of the Flight Test Society of Australia and an Adjunct Associate Professor and guest lecturer at UNSW.
He previously negotiated the US-Australian HIFiRE Program on hypersonic research with the US Air Force in 2006, and is now working on a new Defence Innovation Hub program for the Australian Navy.
