Perfect. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
It is a privilege, distinguished committee members, to be here to speak to you today.
ING Robotic Aviation, formerly ING Engineering, has extensive experience operating UAVs with the Canadian army and the Royal Canadian Navy over the last six or seven years. From 2008 onward we flew operationally in Afghanistan with some American technology very successfully. There were some 30,000 hours accumulated and by the end we were putting three aircraft up over our Canadian troops during the day, then bringing them back and putting two up at night, and we did that right through to the end of combat activities.
We were fortunate to be asked to provide the same support off our frigates in the Indian Ocean from 2011 until September.
It's a bit of a unique story. We really are today, as both a service provider and a producer of these technologies, the leader here in Canada. We've got some great recognition as we don't leave defence but pivot into five other sectors: oil and gas, mining, utilities, forestry, and precision agriculture. A lot of these sectors are also important to this committee because they are also critical infrastructure. Our ability to go out today is unparalleled. When you add up the number of hours that we've flown for our country—I added it up and it's about 81 laps around the planet—it is a pretty significant experience here.
We've got some great recognition just of late from both the IEEE here as the leading technology company in Ottawa and from the national association, receiving the organization award just recently in company with NASA and Transport Canada.
What I really wanted to talk about today was my opinion that perhaps the Canadian Armed Forces is going the wrong way.
When you compare what's going on with the rest of the world, and Mr. Barlow did a great job of summarizing the things that are happening in the rest of the world, for a country like ours, this ability to do more with less is something we do every day. We are very inventive and certainly in my company we are very inventive in creating cost-effective solutions.
We have this challenge of geography in Canada, which means we need many systems deployed in many places if we're going to do it and do it well. We've seen the high cost of some of the military-oriented drones, especially made by our brothers to the south or other parts of the world, so maybe those aren't the right answers for good surveillance.
Again, Mr. Barlow highlighted that the U.S. military has, he said 5,000—I would say 7,000—robotic aircraft. The Luftwaffe has said that as a point of policy they are going to get rid of their manned pilots. The Portugese military is employing a drone fleet to monitor its maritime air space which extends all the way out to the Azores. The Kenyan defence force uses some of our equipment along with other pieces of equipment on a daily basis to monitor their troublesome Somali border.
So what are we doing in Canada? Well, I would say the Royal Canadian Air Farce, sorry, excuse me, the Royal Canadian Air Force, and this is on the public record so I do apologize to my friends in the light blue, doesn't really have a credible system or a program to deliver this capability. We've seen the JUSTAS program move forward time and time again. The Royal Canadian Navy has abandoned its capability and is planning to develop something for 2021. The Canadian army has some hand throwable simple systems for close-in work but nothing for persistence.
Of course, our SOF folks have a minimal capability and I've seen in the press where they are looking to purchase manned surveillance platforms.
What I'd like to focus on are two case studies where I think these technologies in robotic aviation could play a role. The first would be Arctic search and rescue.
This slide just shows that we actually do stuff all over Canada both operationally and for exports.
Canada has signed up separately with the Arctic nations to enhance its search and rescue capability in the north. One of the things you can do with a robotic aircraft is fly out and see things without putting anyone in harm's way. That means that you, as the person responsible, can take greater risks without risking others' lives to go and see things. We've seen a number of cases both in the Arctic and across Canada where this makes sense. I know that when you have to fly a search and rescue aircraft 3,000 kilometres just to get to the area before you start to figure out where Bob went off the rails, where his ATV broke down, or where his snowmobile broke down, that's perhaps not the right answer. You can separate search from rescue. That's the first point.
You can provide from a community a fast search response with locally based robotic aircraft. They're persistent and you can exploit local knowledge. You can even do things like drop emergency supplies. That's a pretty cool capability. This is enabled by the fact that we have smart robots that can be flown locally in the community and, in the north, by Rangers. That's the first thing. From a government's perspective, it's something that the government could do now. The technology is there. This is something that is a fraction of the cost of the satellites required to talk to the big drone. Maybe under $25 million a year is within the scale of things for all the communities across the north. The added advantage there is that when you're out looking, by definition, you are exercising sovereignty.
The second thing I'd like to talk about is disaster response. Again, you have this ability to go out with a robot and see things and provide immediate assistance in a scenario. In most disasters the information you have is dated or in fact it's wrong, because there have been mudslides or the roads have changed or the rivers have broken through. A response team needs to be able to understand exactly what they're walking into. This is where robot mapping can actually create great detailed maps rapidly. This is an example of something we did for the community of Kuujjuaq, an Inuit community in northern Quebec. On the left you see 2-D and 3-D models of what we were able to collect from a single 15-minute flight. This ability to go out rapidly and map a disaster and provide detailed information back to those commanders who are trying to respond to that disaster, whether they are civil or military, is critical. In fact, if you want to do large areas, our Serenity aircraft, which flies for over eight hours, can map a 20-centimetre resolution. It's far in excess of what you can get from satellite. It's really useful information. We can map 200 square kilometres in a single eight-hour flight. That's a capability that just didn't exist before. It wasn't cost-effective before. It wasn't environmentally friendly before. Now you can put teams in place.
When we think of Canada, its budgets, and how we deal with things, our robotic aircraft called Responder, the helicopter, costs the same as a fully kitted F-150.
That fixed-wing aircraft there, which packs up into seven boxes that you can throw on an Air Canada air transport cargo plane, move into location, and actually go straight into operations with, costs about the same as a bucket truck. These are cost-effective solutions designed by Canadians here in Canada. Even the logistics trail of both of those systems—the first one being electric, this one being gas.... It uses fuel at less than half a litre an hour as opposed to a helicopter, which is always doing fuel dumps and also has an environmental cost associated with moving things around.
In my opinion, certainly organizations like DART, the disaster assistance response team, need this kind of capability. In fact, that's why we have reservists across our country who are equipped with this type of technology who give us a great ability to deal with natural disasters, sovereignty, and search and rescue, and to be prepared for the defence of North America.
Mr. Chairman.