16 Boeing Frontiers This is toast It may be small, but this compact laser weapon can zap unwanted unmanned aerial vehicles BY Queena Jones Isaac Neal had one chance—one shot. The mission? Find, track and shoot down an airborne unmanned aerial vehicle. And do so in front of an audience of about 60 people, including senior U.S. military officials. “There were very important people looking directly over my shoulder, and other onlookers watching on screens nearby,” Neal recalled of the event this summer near the California coast. “I had to be careful. It felt like the whole world was watching.” It was over in about 15 seconds. One shot. One toasted drone, which splashed down in the nearby Pacific. “I took a deep breath of relief and put down the controller,” recalled Neal, an engineer with Boeing’s Laser & Electro-Optical Systems team in Albuquerque, N.M. It was a standard gaming system controller. But this was no video game. It was a live-fire test, and for the first time Boeing’s Compact Laser Weapon System had just destroyed an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV, in flight. Unlike the U.S. Army’s High Energy Laser Mobile Demonstrator,
Frontiers October 2015 Issue
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