Helicopter Brownout. Helicopter Brownout is a $100 million per year problem, leading to significant hardware loss, injuries, and fatalities. The NPS project objective is to find ways to define landing zones which will have reduced probability of producing brownout. The challenge is to remotely sense soil and surface characteristics in denied territory. Both civilian remote sensing systems and national technical means were and are being studied. NPS identified a system that meets the requirements and is testing it for suitability. The payoff for this work will be to dramatically reduce the loss rate for men and hardware, particularly in the SOCOM and