Henan, China, has been flooded recently due to heavy rains. Mihe Town is one of the worst-hit places, and communications have been blocked as a result.
However, according to reports, China’s Wing-Loong II-H disaster-relief UAV carried out a five- to six-hour reconnaissance and relay mission over Henan on July 21 to provide external communication services for the people affected by the disaster. On the evening of July 21, people in Mihe Town received such a text message:
Fellows in Mihe Town, communication was interrupted due to heavy rains. The Emergency Management Department urgently dispatched a Wing-Loong drone to reach the sky above your town, which can temporarily restore China Mobile’s public network communications. Limited by the time that Wing-Loong drone stay in the air, The public network recovery time is only five hours. Please report the situation and contact your family as soon as possible. Good luck!
According to analysis, the drone flying to high altitude is equivalent to moving a base station in the air, which is much faster than repairing the base station.
According to reports, the Wing-Loong-2H disaster-response UAV system is a national emergency communications force built by the aviation industry for the Ministry of Emergency Management of China. It is developed on the basis of the Wing-Loong II UAV system and can recover 50 square kilometers of mobile public network communication signals, and establish an audio and video communication network covering 15,000 square kilometers. In view of the situation of “no road, no electricity and no network” in the disaster area, it can realize the horizontal interconnection of image, voice and data through the fusion of aerial networking and high point relay technologies.
In addition, the Wing-Loong II-H weather type UAV system and Wing-Loong-10-H offshore rescue type UAV system have also been developed.
According to reports, the Turkish drone TB2, which became famous in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict last year, was far inferior to Wing-Loong 2 in terms of size, time spent in the air, and bomb load, with the latter even pinning the TB-2 down at the airport and preventing it from taking off.
Wing-Loong 2 is a medium-altitude, long-endurance, reconnaissance/strike integrated multi-purpose UAV that can perform reconnaissance, surveillance and ground strike missions. It is suitable for military missions, anti-terrorism and stability maintenance, border patrols and civil purposes.
Wing-Loong 2 is 11 meters long, has a wingspan of 20 meters, and a height of 4 meters. It has a maximum take-off weight of 4.2 tons and a maximum lift-off of 9,100 meters in actual combat. It can mount 12 precision-guided munitions.
According to previous reports, the air communication platform of Wing-Loong UAV integrates reconnaissance loads such as photoelectric pods and synthetic aperture radars, as well as communications such as airborne satellite stations, public network mobile communication base stations, broadband self-organizing network equipment, and PDT cluster base stations.
In addition, Wing-Loong 2’s satellite data link system is very dominant and can be used normally in places with poor signals, which is very attractive to countries in mountainous and plateau areas.
In this heavy rain in Henan, one hour of rain in Zhengzhou is equivalent to half a year of rain in Beijing. The weather is so bad that you can imagine, so why Wing-Loong 2 can still work normally in the storm?
Wing-Loong II relies on synthetic aperture radar, even in severe weather when photoelectric detection sensors cannot work, “Wing-Loong II” can still perform surveillance cruises, realizing 24-hour all-weather operations in the true sense.
The voyage of Wing-Loong II is also quite amazing. According to the news, the Wing-Loong 2H participating in the disaster relief took off from Anshun, Guizhou at 2:22 pm on July 21, and arrived in Zhengzhou in about 4 hours, and then worked for another five or six hours before returning home.
Thanks to the use of a small, low-fuel-consumption turboshaft engine, Wing-Loong 2 has a maximum flight speed of 370 km/h, a maximum range of more than 5000 km, and can continue flying for 20 hours.
