Page 23: of Maritime Reporter Magazine (September 2024)

MSC TALUGA GROUP

Ladder reels itself out of its drum, comes down the side, and The Taluga Group wanted to ? nd a better way to deliver they can then climb the ridged ladder,” Bruening said. those parts, and looked at using an unmanned aerial vehicle

Thinking beyond basic use of a Jacob’s ladder, the group UAV that could carry those packages and deliver them to a thought about how else MSC could use that capability. ship at sea. In fact, they’re making progress. “Being able to “We imagined that it could be used to lift a standard Navy deliver 90 percent of CASREP parts by a small UAV will do litter up to the deck of our hospital ships. USNS Mercy (T- wonders in increasing our logistics capability at standoff rang-

AH 19) and USNS Comfort (T-AH 20) do have a lift system es. We started with a 200-mile combat radius—today we’re installed, but it has been unreliable and therefore is not used. looking at 1,000 miles,” said Bruening. “This is doable.”

We wanted to see if we could use this Jacob’s ladder not only The Taluga Group is working on this problem with NAVAIR for its intended purpose, but also for this additional purpose (Naval Air Systems Command) and their rapid prototyping di- of hoisting litters with patients up to the deck,” said Bruening. vision—and the Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division “We’re going to install it on Comfort and see how it works.” (NAWCAD) at Pax River, Md., which calls the process Rapid

Prototyping, Experimentation and Demonstration (RPED).

SPECIAL DELIVERY “They’ve got a great team supporting us in developing a

Bruening, Vesely and VanAuker agree that customers tend drone that can do this,” said Bruening. “We’re studying how to take logistics for granted. “They turn in a requisition and to ? y a drone autonomously to a ship at sea that’s moving; expect the part to show up right away,” said Breuning. how to ? y in a communications or GPS denied environment,

Bruening said MSC’s data analytics team examined the and how to operate a drone like this for extended periods that highest priority part requisitions to resolve C4 and C3 CAS- doesn’t require 15 people. I want to be able to open up a suit-

REPS. CASREPs are casualty reports submitted by ships case, pull it out, load the part, tell it where to deliver the part, to notify higher echelons of signi? cant equipment malfunc- then hit ‘go.’ We’re good at sailing T-AKEs and T-AOs. But tions. C3 and C4 CASREPs indicate that an “equipment our mariners are not drone operators, and we’re trying to min- de? ciency exists in mission-essential equipment that either imize the extra workload we’re putting on our people. So, we causes a major degradation, but not loss of a mission area want to keep the concept simple—? y 1,000 miles to deliver (C3), or causes loss of a mission area (C4).” What the data showed was that of the thousands of parts MSC delivered to

The Greenough Advanced Rescue Craft (GARC) is an ships at sea in 2018 to ? x those problems, 90 percent of them unmanned surface vehicle (USV) that deploys a parafoil- based system that relays data between the Mine weighed less than 50 lbs.

Countermeasures USV and the littoral combat ship. Military “In other words, 90 percent of the parts that are breaking

Sealift Command is evaluating GARC for other missions. your ship weigh less than 50 lbs.,” Bruening said. “When we looked at how all of those parts get delivered, we found that those ships came alongside one of our MSC ships, and we passed it over by VERTREP or CONREP (vertical replenish- ment or connected replenishment).”

Using a large helicopter to deliver a small part may not be the best use of available resources.

Photo: U.S. Navy

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