Jim Marino of Columbia Falls flies like an eagle without ever leaving the ground.

As the pilot of an unmanned aerial vehicle system called ScanEagle, Marino has served as the eyes in the sky for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, discovering insurgent activity such as planting bombs on buildings and in roadways.

 He vividly recalled his first deployment imbedded with troops in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. As Marino remotely operated ScanEagle’s cameras and GPS with joysticks, an intelligence officer sat by his side with a laptop relaying the positions of insurgents to Marines in the field.

“We were saving lives every minute,” he said.

Marino now works for Boeing. In his first deployments, he was employed by Insitu Group, a Boeing subsidiary that developed ScanEagle and contracted surveillance services to the Marines.

As a veteran of eight years with the Navy and an 11-month deployment as a reservist to the Middle East, Marino fits seamlessly into the military teams that rely more and more on unmanned aerial vehicle systems for situational awareness.

 According to Marino, the stealthily quiet ScanEagle soared quickly ahead of three competitors during his first deployment in Fallujah.

Originally designed to find schools of tuna for fishing boats, the aircraft can stay airborne for longer than 19 hours on one and a half gallons of gas and fly in light rain. ScanEagle has a range of 80 miles which can expand to 160 miles by a handoff to another operator.

“With our endurance, we blew away a lot of UAVs,” he said.

 ScanEagle offers another advantage in requiring no runway. The 4-foot-long aircraft with a 10-foot wingspan launches from a pneumatic wedge catapult and uses a skyhook system to land.

“Once the aircraft is in the air, it’s on autopilot,” Marino said.

From the keyboard and joysticks, he can change speed and altitude and send the aircraft to any location with a click over the location on a map. He compares the computer setup to a flight simulator.

During the first three days of raids in Fallujah, ScanEagle was the only one of the four unmanned aerial vehicle systems transmitting a bird’s eye view of the battle area.

“Flying at 1,800 feet, we could see insurgents but they couldn’t see us — we could see people on roofs with RPGs,” Marino said. “After the first day of the raid, we earned our wings.”

Even at night, infrared cameras produced real-time video clear enough to ascertain if a person had a weapon.

When enemies appeared, Marino tapped the onboard GPS to obtain specific coordinates of targets. The Marine intelligence officer then used his laptop to transmit the life-saving information through a direct link to F18 pilots or commanders on the ground.

It was a baptism literally under fire for Marino. The action got uncomfortably close more than once.

“I’ll probably never see another Fallujah,” he said. “No other deployments came close.”

Just few months before landing there in 2004, Marino had no thought of a career remotely flying airplanes in war zones. Recently returned from Iraq as a reservist, he just happened to stop by a ScanEagle demonstration at a job fair in Hood River, Ore.

“I’d heard of them but I’d never worked with one before,” he said. “I was intrigued.”

The company representative wasn’t even collecting resumes when Marino struck up a conversation about his credentials. His military service had prepared him with technical training in air search radar systems.

“I told him I had recently returned from the Middle East and I was willing to go back,” he said.

He hit a home run with that statement. The next day, Marino was in the CEO’s office for an interview that ended with a job offer even though he had never even flown a remote-control airplane.

“He knew I had a technical background,” he said. “He took a chance that I’d pick it up.”

  While growing up in The Dalles, Ore., Marino thoroughly mastered joysticks during hours of playing video games with his twin brother and older brother. He has his mother to thank for getting him in on the ground floor with systems such as the Atari 2600.

“My mom kept us up to date with all the new computer games,” he said. “To be honest, the only games I enjoyed were sports games. I didn’t like flight simulators.”

With a wife and a growing family, Marino wasn’t about to pass up this opportunity. He had married Michaelyn Kimmet of Columbia Falls in 2002 and his first daughter was born while he was deployed as a Naval reservist in the Middle East.

“I was one of the first military guys the company hired,” he said.

In May of 2004, Marino went to school for two months to master flying and repairing ScanEagle. He said the early MS-DOS software-based system wasn’t nearly as user-friendly as today’s version.

“It was a little hard — an engineer had designed it,” he said. “It took a little while to figure out. With the new system, the young guys pick it up real quick.”

According to Marino, each operator develops his own technique. He said the most difficult operations involve following high-speed chases of boats and automobiles.

“You can’t teach that in a classroom,” he said.

Marino compares ScanEagle operation to jets launching off of and landing on aircraft carriers. After running initial system checks, he fires up the aircraft’s engine, then launches the 40-pound aircraft up the rail of the catapult and into the air where it can achieve speeds of up to 70 knots.

Once in the air, he runs additional systems checks.

“It’s no more than three or four minutes and its ready to rock-and-roll and get out of there,” he said.

Landing also offers a parallel to aircraft carriers. ScanEagle snags a rope from a 50-foot high pole.

As his new employer expected, Marino picked up the operation in time to assist the Marines in Fallujah as one of a team of four.

“I think I got five flights before I deployed,” he said. “Once I did it a few times, it was like riding a bike.”

So far, he has deployed six times with ScanEagle, operating in a variety of settings, including aboard the USS Trenton and from an oil terminal located 40 miles offshore in the Persian Gulf.

In January, Marino travels to several locations including Vienna, Austria, where he begins cross training on a camcopter S-100, a vertical take-off and landing unmanned aerial vehicle system developed by Schiebel that is 8 feet long and 4 feet tall.

A resident of Columbia Falls since 2006, Marino spends a lot of time away from his family. Marino said he took a year off from unmanned aerial vehicles in 2007 to be with his wife, children Leanne and Jasmine, and stepson Austin Kimmet.

He worked for a time for Columbia Falls Aluminum Plant but found it couldn’t compete with flying like an eagle. An offer from Boeing’s Integrated Defense Systems in St. Louis put him back at the controls.

“I really missed it,” Marino said. “The experience — you can’t match it.”

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com.