CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — During Tuesday's city council meeting, councilmembers approved a lease agreement between Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi's Lonestar Unmanned Aircraft System Center of Excellence and Innovation (LSUASC) and the Corpus Christi International Airport (CCIA).
“We’re really excited to actually bring them on to the airport and consider them an airport tenant," Tyler Miller, Deputy Director of Corpus Christi International Airport said.
The LSUASC program was established in 2013 as a research center at TAMUCC. It includes developmental testing and evaluation of professional unmanned aircrafts that are operated without a pilot.
“An unmanned aircraft is basically anything that can be flown from the grown by a remote operator," Miller said.
Airport officials said they didn't have to spend a dime for this partnership and considers it a privilege to be the homebase for an aeronautical research facility of its kind. Luckily there isn't a cost to the community either.
“So there really isn’t much of a cost to us or the community," Miller said. "They’re coming out, they’re renting a hanger from us. What that allows us to do is call them an airport tenant and what it allows them to do as an FAA test site is say ‘we have a presence at an airport. Not near an airport, we don’t go there to operate, we’re actually based at an airport.”
Bringing the research center to CCIA will allow for expansion of more projects that utilize unmanned aircrafts to public and commercial agencies.
“What this is is an unleashed potential and that opportunity for growth for them to be able to do operations that have never really been done before in the country," Miller said."The fact that we’re going to be that first site for a lot of these operations of that nature, that’s the really cool part, that’s what we’re excited about.”
The LSUASC is deemed as high caliber, as it's one of seven federal aviation administration unmanned aircraft test sites in the United States.
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