KABUL — Maj. Dyrald Cross feels like a kid at Christmas. He just hopes his present -- more than $33 million Cdn worth of unmanned aviation equipment -- doesn't turn into a lump of coal.

Cross, and the rest of the Canadian contingent in Afghanistan's capital city, will be waiting with bated breath Thursday as suppliers conduct test flights of the military's first remotely operated aircraft.

The test was to have been conducted Wednesday but was delayed until radio frequencies could be sorted out.

"Guys have been talking about getting this kind of technology in Canada for 25 years," said Cross, who heads the contingent's Intelligence Surveillance Target Acquisition and Reconnaissance company, or I-STAR, the high-tech arm of the 2,000-member Canadian force.

"The military has always wanted to go over the next hill and see what's out there without actually going up there and poking your head over."

The French-made Sperwer (pronounced SPARE-vare) unpiloted aerial vehicles, or UAVs, have never been flown in extreme heat or from altitudes as high as Kabul, more than 2,000 metres above sea level.

Nevertheless, a spokesman for Oerlikon Contraves Inc., the Canadian-based contractor for the project, said the manufacturers, SAGEM, are confident the four-metre-long aircraft, equipped with cameras, parachutes, inflatable crash bags and a bank of computer equipment, will fly.

"The flight dynamics modelling says it can fly," said Norbert Cyr, himself a former public affairs officer for the military. "The curves predict it is well within the parameters.

"It's just a matter now of putting confirmation dots on the curve over a progressive series of test flights."

Cross, who already has two Coyote armoured-vehicle troops and an electronic warfare troop under his command, hopes to add the four aircraft and all their accompanying equipment to his arsenal by mid-month.

"This country is made up of compounds within compounds within compounds," said Cross, a self-described military brat. "So unless you can (get) elevation above the walls and look into them, you can't really detect what is in there.

"With the UAV, flying overhead with its optics day and night, you can see beyond those walls, beyond line-of-sight, and you get a real-time feed of that back to headquarters."

The Kabul Multi-National Brigade, the operational end of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force, has been using German UAVs until the Canadian ones are ready to go.

Soldiers from Cross's company have been in France training on the units for nine weeks. They've been trickling into Kabul for several days now, setting up the self-contained, mobile computer centres from which they will control the aircraft and where data will be retrieved.

"It was a lot to take in," Bombadier Scott Canning, a native of Parry Sound, Ont., said of the training. "It started off a little dry, but once we saw the plane and the equipment, it got a little more interesting."

The UAVs are powered by 65-horsepower Bombardier engines similar to those used in snowmobiles. Their propellors are made of laminated beechwood, which are intended to break off and spare the engines damage in hard landings.

Already used by six countries, they are launched by catapult from the back of a truck, going from zero to 40 metres per second during takeoff from a 15-metre-long platform.

Boxy like the space shuttle, with a shark-like look about them, they can remain airborne up to six hours on gasoline, with a range of 180 kilometres -- more if ground stations or another UAV relays commands.

Flights can be pre-programmed using computerized maps or changed in mid-flight from ground stations or through another UAV.

Video is shot from a ball housing mounted on the underside of the aircraft, called an orientable line-of-sight payload, and can be controlled by a joystick in front of a screen generating a live image.

The camera can lock onto a target while the plane changes direction, and the aircraft can be programmed in mid-flight to follow the camera's sights. There is also a forward-looking, wide-angle camera mounted in the UAV's nose, from which the "pilot" can fly by the seat of his pants.

The launch area is currently located on the Kabul base; the normal landing area will be next door, once engineers complete their mine-clearing operation.

The UAV can be brought down within 100 metres of a target simply by shutting down the engine, deploying a 117-square-metre parachute and popping open a series of airbags to cushion its landing.

For now, Cross's flight patterns must be limited to ISAF's area of operations, surrounding Kabul. But if NATO finalizes plans to expand its mission in Afghanistan, they can be used virtually anywhere.

"We will have the benefit of going places without being threatened by mines," said Cross. "Or we can go without triggering the fact that you've been there and they don't know that you're watching them.

"It's a tremendous asset."