Y. mini spy plane flying high

PROVO — No, it's not a paper airplane, though you can fold it up.

It's a child's — and apparently a general's — dream: an airplane you can pull out of your pocket, program it where to fly and throw it into the air.

This isn't origami but the creation of a few ingenious Brigham Young University professors and students. It's called a "tactical mini unmanned air vehicle," and versions of it are flying somewhere in the world for the U.S. Air Force.

Complete with a 24-inch, collapsible wingspan, the plane can be piloted by a computer with a GPS system, thanks to a computer board developed at BYU.

"The board lets any operator, regardless of experience, launch the plane, fly it to a predesignated point and land it for later use," said Tim McLain, an associate professor of mechanical engineering.

"They could program it with a laptop or a PDA and give it a GPS location, or they may have a map on their laptop or PDA, and they may just select a point on the map and just say, 'Go there,' and then they will take the airplane out, throw it in the air and it would get there," he said.

The plane was first field-tested in August by Air Force special operations teams during war-games trials in Mississippi. Air Force officials were so happy with the mini-plane's performance that they ordered more and deployed them in September.

"What they're using it for exactly, we don't know," McLain said. "They won't tell us. You can make some pretty good guesses, though."

The Air Force commissioned the school's MAGICC Lab to build the tiny spy plane about six months ago. Students working in BYU's Multiple Agent Intelligent Coordination and Control Lab (MAGICC, in brief) each spent a month this past summer working on the plane at the Air Force Research Lab in Florida.

"As engineers, this is what interests us. This is our passion," said Walt Johnson, an electrical engineering graduate student from Monticello, Ill. "This is exactly the kind of work that I'd like to do professionally."

Next up for BYU's MAGICC research team is figuring out how to fly multiple planes at once from a single computer.

"We want to see if we can figure out how to put a fleet of these in the sky for maximum coverage of an area — that way they are communicating with the operator by way of the ground station and with each other," said Randy Beard, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering.

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E-mail: ldethman@desnews.com

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