# News Source Record

**L-Ne / Open-source news extract** — Original media coverage of unmanned aerial systems.

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Collection date | 1 January 2011 |
| Platform | Quiet Systems |
| Data label | Open-source news record // LRRK collection product |
| Handling | Public-source material. Image rights require separate verification before publication. |
| Scale | Local |
| Language | English |
| Terms matched | unmanned aerial; drones; UAS Center of Excellence |

## Bibliographic

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Outlet | The Missoulian (Missoula, Montana) — Daily Inter Lake staff |
| Title | Center promotes unmanned drones |
| Dateline | Kalispell, Montana |
| First publisher | no — Daily Inter Lake staff printed in The Missoulian |
| Original URL | https://www.newspapers.com/image/439358829/?terms=%22unmanned%20aerial%22 |
| Archive URL | — |
| Dedup key | 2011-01-01|missoulian|zinke-montana-uas-center-excellence |
| Source grade | B1 |

## Pictures

- page: 2011-01-01-missoulian-uav-page.jpg
- clips folder: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1U9vqOy5tmxAI-5y7Uyjb3iP6t3U53K83


## Record

**Verified extract — [Fact — B1]** Caleb Soptelean of the Daily Inter Lake, printed in The Missoulian, reported from Kalispell that Ryan Zinke, a state senator from Whitefish, was trying to get a new industry off the ground in Montana as co-director of the Montana Unmanned Aerial Systems Center of Excellence. The basic idea was to develop unmanned aerial vehicles — also known as drones — for a variety of nonmilitary uses. The first test flight likely would occur around the Lewistown area in late summer 2011, with initial testing for crop analysis or cattle tracking. Zinke said two Lewistown sites could be used: Montana State University-Northern has a satellite campus next to the city airport, and the Western Transportation Institute has a facility and test track there. The center would be located administratively at MSU-Northern in Havre. The University of Montana, two campuses of Montana State University, Rocky Mountain College in Billings, and Mississippi State University were joining together on the project. Zinke, 48, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL commander (2007), said a possible use is counting wolves. He said Montana has a diversity of climate, crops, vegetation and topography that makes it ideally suited for the Center of Excellence, and that Rocky Mountain College has an accredited aviation program that will help with training. “We’re attempting to use our air space, the Big Sky, to bring an emerging industry into Montana.” He said in a press release that Montana’s air space is the perfect environment to research how to safely integrate drones with commercial and private air traffic. Most drones are electric, but some of the larger ones run on gasoline; MSU-Northern would help with a transition to heavier fuels such as jet and diesel.

**Kinematic object.** Small civil UAS (Montana Center of Excellence; planned Lewistown test flights for crop/cattle work).

**Coverage frame.** civil / industrial development

## Source integrity

- Why this is treated as an original: Montana regional staff (Daily Inter Lake) on a state UAS center stand-up, printed on the Missoulian Montana page.
- Wire reprint status: No AP/Reuters/McClatchy byline. Byline is Daily Inter Lake; Missoulian is a same-state reprint.
- OCR / image-page caveats: Tesseract on the Newspapers.com page scan. Left-column wrap mixed with obituaries; quotes and institutional names were readable in a cropped story column.
- What was excluded: Adjacent obituaries and the rest of the Montana page.

## LRRK relevance

Watch / Passport. A Watch desk would have logged a state-backed civil UAS test program aiming at Lewistown airspace in 2011.

*LRRK — security assurance for systems that sense, move, and act.*

L-Ne