Gene Hartman finished the checklist on his lap and the single-engine aircraft barreled down the runway, taking off to test technology that will soon lift the Civil Air Patrol to new roles in homeland security.
In the back, John C. Kershenstein sat at a computer console, examining images of the Washington suburbs being painted across its large screen from a sophisticated digital camera in the airplane's belly.
These two volunteers - one a retired Air Force fighter pilot, the other a civilian Navy scientist - are testing high-tech equipment that security experts say will vastly extend the reach of the military on homeland-security and disaster-recovery missions. And it will do it at relatively low cost when placed in the hands of the nation's Civil Air Patrol over the next year.
It is a small plane, so gusty winds wag the wings and pitch the plane up and down. But the computer compensates for that. The images are sharp. And the precise location of every pixel is tagged with latitude and longitude data that can direct people on the ground to whatever - be it a person or changes to equipment or infrastructure - could constitute a threat.
The system can be programmed to point out what is present today that was not on a previous pass, or what has been removed. It can spot specific colors and things that do not seem to belong, like metal objects in a field.
All of this happens from a $400,000 gasoline-sipping, single-engine airplane flown by volunteer pilots - not from a billion-dollar fuel-guzzling military aircraft, or from a satellite.
The quasi-public Delaware River Maritime Enterprise Council has already used the Civil Air Patrol, a volunteer auxiliary of the U.S. Air Force, to beef up security at the Port of Philadelphia. It is looking forward to even more value from this new system.
Earl P. Freilino II, the council's security team leader, said that for about $300 an hour the Civil Air Patrol "can fly random surveillance and find out what's amiss on rail lines, highway choke points, and port facilities."
The patrol's trained volunteers are critical at a time of "limited manpower and financial resources," said Freilino, a retired FBI terrorism expert and former Pennsylvania homeland-security director.
Sixteen aircraft like the one rolled out at a ceremony here yesterday will soon join the patrol's nationwide fleet of 550 small airplanes.
Kershenstein, who was at the computer console on this mission, is a volunteer Civil Air Patrol lieutenant colonel. But everybody calls him "Dr. K" - he has a doctorate in physics and is the architect of the new system.
His day job is research physicist in the optical-sciences division of the U.S. Navy Research Laboratory. With the Navy's blessing, he adapted a system found in large aircraft, such as the Navy's four-engine P3 Orions based at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station.
In military aircraft, highly trained technicians are at the consoles. But the "CAP version can be operated by trained volunteers with a high school education," Kershenstein said.
"We started working on this technology in the 1980s to detect Soviet bombers," he said. Then, in places like Bosnia, "we refined it to look for tanks hidden under trees. We've kept looking for ways to find things people were hiding from us."
Sixteen Gippsland GA-8 Airvans, made in Australia from components that are 90 percent made in the United States, have been purchased for the new technology. No U.S.-made aircraft was big enough to house the equipment and small enough to be economical, said Drew J. Alexa III, the patrol's technology chief.
They call the new system hyperspectral enhanced reconnaissance. It can see 60 colors, far more than the human eye, which helps it analyze things on the ground and spot specific types of equipment.
When the system sees things it has been told to look for - colors, things that do not fit the surroundings, or changes - little squares appear on the computer screen around the object. The operator can instantly access all the data the system has recorded about the object.
The file can be e-mailed by satellite phone to a command post or law enforcement agency. The whole database can be downloaded upon landing for exhaustive analysis.
The Civil Air Patrol, established in 1941, has 60,000 members in 1,500 squadrons nationwide. It was created to fly search-and-rescue missions and provide aerospace education. In recent years, it has taken on a variety of homeland-security reconnaissance missions.
Hartman, the retired Air Force fighter pilot in the front seat for this test mission, spends a lot of time these days flying small Civil Air Patrol planes toward the White House, Camp David, and other restricted areas. These missions, he said, are part of relentless testing of homeland-security systems.
