Six missions that need more than one machine
Each is set out as a concept of operations — the problem, the sequence, the force mix, and what degrades it. No case studies, because we have not earned any yet.
An area of interest is larger than one sensor footprint, and what matters is change rather than a single image. Flying a pattern gives you snapshots hours apart, and by the time two frames are compared the moment has passed.
Distributed coverage with onboard change detection
Three aircraft fly overlapping lanes and build a baseline of the area.
Lane assignment adjusts to wind and remaining endurance rather than holding a fixed pattern.
Onboard comparison flags a change against the baseline and raises it, rather than streaming full video.
The operator confirms or dismisses. Confirmed changes become track files.
Where the change is reachable, a rover takes a closer look without committing an aircraft.
Remaining aircraft close the gap left by the tasked asset, so revisit degrades gracefully instead of collapsing.
5 assets, one operator
What degrades this, and what the system does about it
Stated plainly because an evaluator will find these anyway. Mitigations are design decisions, not guarantees.
Low cloud, dust and smoke break an EO baseline and generate false change detections.
Detections carry an obscuration flag and the baseline is not overwritten while it is set. The operator sees a gap in coverage rather than a confident wrong answer.
Flying lower for resolution narrows the footprint and lengthens the revisit interval.
Altitude is a tasked parameter per lane, so an area can be flown wide and fast or narrow and slow, and the resulting revisit rate is shown before the task is committed.
Change detection at full frame rate exceeds what the airframe can process at this class.
Detection runs on a reduced cadence sized to the class, and that cadence is published in the configuration rather than assumed.
A rover cannot reach much of the terrain an aircraft can observe.
Reachability is computed from terrain before the rover is offered, so the operator is not handed a task that will fail.
Take this mix into the fleet builder
Bring a mission, not a shortlist
We will walk the concept of operations against your requirement and say plainly where it does not fit.