Despite a spate of delays, second-guessing and cost overruns, the Global Hawk is once again on track to replace one of America’s most noted aircraft: the U-2 spy plane, famed for its role in the cold war and more recently Afghanistan.
The Air Force decided last month to stick with its $12 billion Global Hawk programme, betting that the unmanned drone can replicate the aging U-2’s ability to sweep up a broad mix of intelligence from commanding heights, and do it more safely and for much longer stretches than the piloted U-2. The Navy is also onboard, with plans to spend $11 billion on a version that could patrol vast ocean areas.
Since 2001, the cost of the Air Force programme has more than doubled, and the service recently cut its planned fleet of Global Hawks to 55 from 77. That lifted the total estimate for each plane, including the sensors and all the research and development, to $218 million, compared to $28 million for the Reaper, the largest armed drone.
Analysts say the biggest test – and perhaps the next step in the shift from manned to robotic aircraft – will come if Northrop can field enough Global Hawks with better eavesdropping gear to make the commanders feel comfortable about retiring the U-2.
That transition was originally supposed to happen this year. Edward A. Walby, a business development director at Northrop, said the company now expected to have enough Global Hawks in the air by the end of 2012. That would give the Air Force time to check them out before phasing out the 32 U-2s by 2015.
The Global Hawks, monitored by shifts of pilots on computers in California, fly 24-hour missions, twice as long as a U-2 pilot can stay up, and the Pentagon says they will be cheaper to operate. Like the U-2, they can peer down from twice the height of a commercial airliner and spot a group of insurgents or a tank 50 to 100 miles away. The images can be sent directly to troops in a fire-fight or to intelligence centres, where analysts examine them and send out more in-depth reports.
The U-2 was created in the 1950s to monitor Soviet nuclear sites. It is still used, as the Global Hawk will be, to supplement satellites by gazing into North Korea and Iran from outside their borders. But the towering heights have also enabled the U-2 to survey so much territory in Afghanistan, and scoop up so many Taliban phone calls, that it has become one of the best sources of tips for where to send the Predator and Reaper drones, which fly at lower altitudes and fire missiles.
Intelligence officials say the combination of images and intercepted conversations from the same area provides a richer picture of what is going on, and they want the Global Hawk to be able to act as a similar trigger for dispatching other planes.
A more basic version of the Global Hawk has supplied battlefield images in Afghanistan and Iraq since shortly after the 2001 terror attacks. But the effort to enlarge the plane to carry eavesdropping gear and other new sensors required a more substantial redesign than expected. And Northrop is now trying to resolve the problems with the parts. It is replacing faulty electrical generators and navigation systems and improving the eavesdropping software.
Under the latest plans, the Air Force will buy 31 of the Global Hawks with upgraded cameras and the eavesdropping gear and 11 with a sensor that could more closely track the movements of enemy troops and vehicles. The Navy would build 68 of the maritime models, Germany is buying a few of the planes, and NATO might buy some, too.
Source: The New York Times