Global Hawk Makes First Pilot-Less Flight Across Pacific
By Jim Mathews
23-Apr-2001 8:48 AM U.S. EDT
The U.S. Air Force/Northrop Grumman Global Hawk uninhabited aerial vehicle (UAV) kicked off a nearly two-month deployment to South Australia with a record-setting non-stop flight from Edwards AFB, Calif., to the Royal Australian Air Force's Edinburgh base in South Australia, landing safely today shortly after 8:30 p.m. Adelaide time (7 a.m. Eastern).
Renamed Southern Cross II for the journey, the aircraft will make about a dozen flights in and around Australia during the next few weeks as part of the joint U.S./Australian/Canadian Tandem Thrust exercises, where U.S. and Australian officials will examine the reconnaissance UAV's suitability for the broader surveillance mission.
"Part of the collaboration between Australia and the U.S. has been to modify the [synthetic aperture radar] system so we can use it in the maritime mode," RAAF Air Commodore Brian Bentley tells AviationNow.com , finding, identifying and tracking targets over the water - something the Global Hawk wasn't originally designed to do.
Though Australia isn't yet committed to the aircraft, if the evaluation goes well the Australian Defense Force (ADF) could use Global Hawk to supplement existing surveillance assets, such as the Jindalee over-the-horizon radar system or patrols by Lockheed Martin P-3C Orion turboprops.
"We're looking at a mix of planned and unplanned demonstrations of the air vehicle to allow us to conduct a combined evaluation of the utility of the system fro the Australian and U.S. defense forces," says Rod Smith, the Global Hawk program manager in Australia's Defense Science and Technology Organization (DSTO). "The main activities that will occur will be maritime surveillance activities while the Global Hawk is down here, followed by littoral surveillance and land surveillance activities and finally stand-off imaging."
The aircraft took off from Edwards AFB, Calif., Sunday at about 4:52 am local time (7:52 am Eastern), and flew autonomously across the Pacific Ocean, touching down at RAAF Edinburgh nearly 24 hours later.
After giving the aircraft a taxi command and a takeoff command, Edwards controllers monitored the flight for its first 20 minutes. After that, the UAV flew its pre-programmed course and was picked up by Australian ground stations about 20 minutes away from the RAAF base.
Controllers were "purely monitoring the aircraft's progress," Bentley notes. "It flew all the way here and touched down without any human intervention."
The event marks the first pilot-less flight across the Pacific Ocean.
The most treacherous part of the flight was expected to be a roughly eight-hour leg in an Inter Tropical Convergence Zone that migrates between 15 degrees south and 15 degrees north latitude, where thunderstorms cluster almost continuously at this time of year. But Bentley says weather turned out to be uneventful during the flight, and landing conditions were close to ideal - dead calm, though slightly overcast.
With a wingspan about the same as that of a Boeing 737, Global Hawk weighs about 25,600 lbs. fully fueled and carries an integrated sensor suite with a synthetic aperture radar and an electro-optic/infrared sensor all sharing a common processor.
Right now, Global Hawk doesn't have a ground
station for sensor analysis, though Australian
companies and the DSTO have come up with a
ground station to analyze sensor data in real-time
or near-real time under their Australian Ground
Element (AGE) program. The RAAF and DSTO
say they are working closely with the U.S. Air
Force and Northrop Grumman's Ryan
Aeronautical Center - prime contractor for the
Global Hawk - under a four-year deal called
Project Arrangement 13.
-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001