Diamond Aircraft is to offer a variant of its flagship special mission aircraft DA62 MPP for environmental surveillance missions. The new turnkey solution, designated the DA62 Vanguard, will make its debut at the international Paris Airshow event from 19–25 June at Le Bourget airport in France and will also be on display at the Multi Mission Expo in Sywell in the UK from 8-10 June. For the first time Diamond, together with Overwatch Imaging and Trakka Systems, has proofed a multi mission sensor mix on the DA62 MPP: It will be outfitted with the AI-driven WAMI (wide-area, multi-domain mapping and ISR) sensor TK-8 from Overwatch Imaging and the EO/IR (electro-optical, infrared) camera TC300 from Trakka Systems.

The DA62 MPP Vanguard's unique configuration is targeted at customers who have a requirement for affordable airborne environmental surveillance solution with low operating costs that can be flexibly used for various missions. Perfectly suited for applications such as automated fire mapping, vegetation analyses, flood mapping, wildlife monitoring, oil spill mapping, 3D modelling and many other missions, like border security or search and rescue.

With the TK-8 five spectral bands (RGB, NIR, SWIR, LWIR and MWIR), this new Diamond Aircraft special mission turnkey solution can detect anomalies, interpret them through its AI control, and deliver the results to the operator in the aircraft or to the decision makers on the ground, all in real time. Thus, in acutely dangerous situations involving forest fires, fire sources and fire histories can be analysed and fed into GIS systems to provide critical information to prevent worse. It can also be used to monitor forest health for proactive prevention or as a coordinator aircraft with wildfire intelligence capabilities. Advanced software means that not only wildfire missions can be flown, also change detection and search and rescue missions make the Vanguard a versatile civil-protection aircraft.

“We’re honoured to be selected by Diamond Aircraft to support the Vanguard configuration of the impressive DA62 MPP,” says Greg Davis, founder and CEO of Overwatch Imaging. “Overwatch Imaging has a proven track record supporting time-critical detection and monitoring roles for users who depend on accurate, timely and automated airborne intelligence for missions that matter around the world. We’re proud to continue that tradition in partnership with Diamond Aircraft and its customers.”

The TK-8 covers a large area to solve a common problem as human-intensive imaging systems require highly trained and alert observers who are tasked with locating small objects of interest in vast and challenging environments. This manual method of airborne searching can be inefficient, ineffective, labour-intensive and time consuming. The Trakka TC300 has a 360° field of view. This allows the operator to have a closer look at the situation on the ground.

Adam Boniecki, business development manager, Trakka Systems comments: “Trakka Systems is proud to be a partner of Diamond Aircraft and excited to support the monitoring of global environmental changes. The TC-300 allows for easy integration with other mission critical systems, like the Overwatch system and other AI technologies in this vein. These partnerships strive to bring cutting edge solutions that represent just a glimpse of the ongoing advancement in airborne surveillance.”