As it reconsiders its unmanned aviation strategy, the Navy has decided to cease funding the X-47B bat-winged drone that made aviation history in recent years. The first-ever autonomous unmanned aircraft to be launched from and recovered on a carrier deck, the X-47B, is likely to run out of funding by the end of fiscal year 2016. The Navy has not requested money for the program in its fiscal year 2017 budget.
The X-47B remains in “standby status” at the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River, Maryland, Capt. Beau Duarte, the Navy’s Unmanned Carrier Aviation program manager, told National Defense Feb. 10 in a statement.
There is still a chance, however, that the aircraft could fly again, he said. The Navy received $250 million in fiscal year 2016 for “risk reduction activities” for a future drone known as the unmanned carrier launched strike and surveillance, or UCLASS. The Naval Air Systems Command will “evaluate what surrogate aircraft activities, including further X-47B operations, are cost effective to meet these risk reduction goals,” Duarte said.
The latest decision regarding the X-47B caps off a complex turn of events for this program since the Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a contract in 2007 to build a carrier combat drone.
The company produced two of the tail-less, strike fighter-sized unmanned aircraft — dubbed Salty Dog 501 and Salty Dog 502. The Navy was ready to mothball them in the summer of 2015 and send them to an aviation museum, but reversed course in the face of congressional backlash. Lawmakers chided the Navy for abandoning the program at a time when other nations are rushing to develop advanced combat drones and anti-ship missiles that would make long-range aircraft like the X-47B more valuable in a future war.
The X-47B in August 2014 took off and landed alongside a manned F/A-18E Super Hornet fighter. In April 2015, it made aviation history again with the successful completion of the first-ever autonomous aerial refueling of an unmanned aircraft.
The Naval Air Systems Command extended Northrop Grumman’s unmanned combat air systems demonstration contract through the end of calendar year 2015. The Navy spent $1.5 billion on the unmanned combat aircraft demonstration over the past eight years.
A Northrop Grumman spokeswoman declined to comment on the 2017 budget decision.
Scott Winship, Northrop Grumman vice president of advanced air warfare, told reporters last month during a media tour of the company’s aviation facilities in Palmdale, California, that he was hopeful the Navy would continue to fund the X-47B.
The aircraft has only flown a fraction of its projected service life, he said. “It’s a 55,000-pound airplane, carries 4,000 pounds of bombs. And there is room for additional sensors.” The achievements of this aircraft are extraordinary, but more work is needed to push the technology further, Winship said. “You can’t say that landing and taking off a carrier 15 times or plugging a probe/drogue one time proves that it works operationally,” but more testing and experimentation could help the Navy gain confidence that unmanned aircraft can be integrated into the carrier wing, he added. The next step would be to make them fly in a combat-realistic scenario. “We always did our takeoffs and landings aboard a clean deck, in calm seas, with nobody else around, only watching one airplane come onboard, that’s not the operational type of dance the Navy does.”
With more time and effort, the X-47B could show Navy leaders the art of the possible, he said. “We’ve outlined a plan to finish the program we started in 2007 that was truncated.”
The airplane was designed for 16,000 hours of service, Winship said. As a prototype, it would be allowed to fly just 4,000 hours, but the Navy only agreed to 400 hours, he explained, “Because we didn’t build a full scale ‘bend and break’ article.” So far, “We’ve used 70 hours of the 400.” The airplanes that are now at Patuxent River, Winship said, have 80 percent of their life left.
The apparent end of the X-47B program comes as the Navy rethinks its broader strategy for deploying unmanned aircraft aboard big-deck carriers. Officials announced this week that the UCLASS program is morphing from a strike/surveillance drone to a carrier-based unmanned aerial refuelling tanker. The new initiative, known as a carrier-based aerial-refuelling system, or CBARS, is seen as a potential “combat multiplier” for the air wing that would help to extend the range of manned Navy fighters.
Photo: X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration conducts flight operations aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt.
Source: National Defense Magazine
This is disturbing. The future of aviation is unmanned drones. Current generation aircraft are already pushing the endurance limits of human pilots and are operated more by computers than by the pilot anyway. No human pilot can make the thousands of minute corrections per second that are required to keep these planes from falling out of the sky. Only computers can do that. In order to get further performance increases, the human pilot needs to be taken out of the equation entirely. Remote operators can also control these craft either from a carrier, or from a base located anywhere in the world without being subjected to stresses of flight and far from the front lines where the drones are operating so if a drone is lost, rescuing a human pilot is no longer an issue. Having fewer of our people put at risk in an armed conflict is never a bad thing.
Agreed!
I like all your coment except the falling out of the sky part, these babies glide i know, this IS THE wing. The hustle and very boomerang x47 sweep is an indespensible formation in flight and in some respects cant be improved upon. The project should be soaking wet in cash and amplified to the MAX, yes im in, having tested models of this configuration since 1972
James is right. Flight holds some narrow requirements that just wont change and craft modeling is the research. As long as atmospheric loft is the issue, we have achieved glide ratios in droves with this lead angle glider unsurpassed. Fido here cuts a mean swath fer shure, out and back. All hail the great wingy.
The battery system Lift designed by General Atomics for submersibles if stored on deck at room temperature can go into thermal runaway during a charging cycle. When GA tested a 7 battery test in their test camber it went into thermal runaway. GA did not disclose this failure to the US government. Talk to Paul Clark the director, he refused to publish the test results.