Israel's Bird Aerosystems launched a new airborne surveillance, intelligence, and observation (ASIO) suite, the ASIO Environmental Monitoring System, at the Paris Airshow to combat the threat of oil spills.
The ASIO system integrates electro-optical payload and multi-mode radars with a new advanced sensor known as Sea Eye, enabling real-time spectral detection and classification of surface and even submerged oil and organic compounds. The system can use real-time oil pattern recognition and classification, which can predict the oil’s spread, the company said.
Growing fears of oil spills around the world caused by aging tanker fleets have driven the need for more sophisticated products to tackle the issue. Although recent statistics show crude trades on the wane, from 1975 to 2020 they increased by 0.51 percent a year to 1.72 billion tons, according to UNCTAD.
Bird Aerosystems claims its product can help monitor oil slick spreads, enabling decision-makers to take prompt steps to ensure they get contained as quickly and effectively as possible.
“We are excited to introduce our groundbreaking ASIO environmental monitoring system, which effectively detects and mitigates oil spills' costs and ecological impact,” said Ronen Factor, co-CEO and founder of Bird Aerosystems. “Using the advanced Sea Eye sensor enables customers to effectively detect and immediately reduce the direct and indirect damage costs of oil spills, while significantly minimizing the total impact on the environment and economics.”
In May, the UN activated a rescue plan devised to evade worst-case scenarios involving a decaying floating storage and offloading vessel marooned in the Red Sea, which experts fear could start leaking or even explode before the scheme, which took years to draw up, is completed. The vessel has about 1.1 million barrels of oil on board, about two-thirds of what the very large crude carrier Amoco Cadiz had on board when it went down off Brittany, France, in 1978.