Eyes in the sky. That's what Persistent Surveillance Systems of Xenia provides companies and organizations.
PSS has six pilots and three Cessna aircraft on which its Hawkeye video surveillance camera is mounted and operated.
According to Ross McNutt, president of PSS, they've used their Hawkeye camera system to gather environmental data on the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, provide emergency support for the Iowa National Guard during a flood, help with traffic management and security at NASCAR races and support police in several major cities, including Baltimore and Philadelphia.
Last summer, Persistent Surveillance Systems received a grant of $900,000 from the Ohio Third Frontier initiative to develop wide-area airborne surveillance technology for continuous second-by-second video monitoring of city-size areas for law enforcement and security purposes.
What PSS developed is the Hawkeye II camera system.
"Hawkeye II is a colorized higher-resolution camera with 192 million pixels," McNutt explains. "Our original Hawkeye system was 88 million pixels. The Hawkeye II camera is comparable to 600 simultaneous video cameras. It enables us to watch a five-mile by five-mile area of a major city."
The live video is downlinked in real time to PSS analysts at the command center.
"When we're working with police departments, police officers are also in our command center and in constant contact with police dispatchers who give them information about crimes in progress, "McNutt says. PSS has assisted law enforcement organizations throughout the United States with more than 30 murder investigations since 2007.
PSS started in 2007 with four employees and now has 25.
"We're partnering with Clark State Community College and the Advanced Technical Intelligence Center for Human Systems Development to train more analysts," he says. They have 45 analysts in training and plan on hiring many of them to work on the new Hawkeye II system.
"We're very appreciative of the support of the Third Frontier program," McNutt states. "It's allowing us to grow at a much faster rate."
Source: Ross McNutt, Persistent Surveillance System
Writer: Lynne Meyer