Global Hawks Point Way For Civil UAS
Jan 21, 2009
By Guy Norris
EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. - Northrop Grumman believes NASA's upcoming exploitation of the Global Hawk autonomous unmanned air vehicle for science missions will pave the way for regular unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) operations in controlled airspace and possibly lead to dedicated commercial applications.
"This will open up a whole new area for us," says George Guerra, vice president of Northrop Grumman High-Altitude Long-Endurance (HALE) Systems. Guerra, who has responsibility for overall Global Hawk program performance and growth, says the five-year Space Act Agreement with NASA has prompted a wave of interest in potential new uses. "When people see what we can do, it will maybe open the door to many other applications."
Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems Vice President Gary Ervin adds that with NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) using Global Hawk for environmental science research, new roles are likely to emerge.
Ervin says these could include disaster relief, border patrol and communications relay. NASA's aircraft are already scheduled to undertake hurricane monitoring flights, with an initial demonstration sortie to the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico planned for September of this year. The first full-up hurricane mission is planned for August-September 2010.
Under the agreement with NASA, Northrop Grumman will share the aircraft to conduct its own flight-test and demonstration work. This will include further tests on integration of autonomous aircraft into the national airspace, as well as flight-tests of specific new systems. Guerra says "besides NASA, we're looking at testing systems for other people, including a package for a communications relay system. We've also had talks about a suite of sensors for border patrol and littoral-type sea surveillance," he adds without identifying the customers.
NASA expects to conduct the first taxi tests of the initial refurbished Global Hawk in February before progressing to flight-tests in March as a prelude to conducting science missions this summer. First to fly will be the former U.S. Air Force-operated test vehicle AV-6, which is one of the initial batch of seven Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration airframes developed under a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency program. A second aircraft, AV-1, and the first Global Hawk prototype, will follow AV-6 into the air around two months later.
AV-1 will be used initially for flight-testing sensors and payload systems, while AV-6, which is a lighter airframe with more payload capacity, will be used predominantly for long-range science and test missions. NASA Global Hawk Project Manager Chris Naftel says following the initial Global Hawk Pacific (GloPac) 2009 science mission in June/July of this year, the subsequent hurricane flight in September will be "to prove to the FAA that we can operate safely in national airspace." The mission is viewed primarily as a concept of operations demonstration, but hurricane surveillance will be an added bonus. GloPac will involve six flights, the final one being a mission to sample the atmosphere during a flight from the north pole to a position off the coast of Southern California.
Global Hawk photo: NASA
