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Navy weapons buyer views future UAV platforms

A few weeks after the Navy awarded Northrop Grumman a contract to build an aircraft carrier-capable unmanned aircraft, the Navy’s top weapons buyer visited the company’s UAV facility Wednesday in California.

Delores Etter, the Navy acquisition czar, visited Northrop’s facilities in Palmdale, Calif., to view two future Navy UAV platforms: the Fire Scout unmanned helicopter and the Unmanned Combat Air System.

“I had an excellent visit with the Northrop Grumman leadership in Palmdale,” Etter said in a statement. “Fire Scout and the UCAS Demonstration programs are both critical facets of the Navy’s implementation of unmanned systems into the future concept of operations.”

Lt. Cmdr. John Schofield, Etter’s spokesman, said his boss actively pursues opportunities to personally engage with industry and satellite commands.

“Dr. Etter believes it is critical to get out on the road, meet with industry leadership and get a true sense of their commitment all the way to the top,” Schofield noted.

Aug. 1, the Navy awarded Northrop a $636 million cost-plus-incentive-fee contract for the Unmanned Combat Air System Carrier Demonstration. The demonstration is intended to prove the technology can provide the fleet’s aircraft carriers with a long-range pilotless strike aircraft.

The competition for the UCAS award was between Boeing’s X-45N test drone and Northrop’s X-47B. Both single-engine planes were originally designed for both the Air Force and the Navy as part of the Joint UCAS program. That program was quashed by the most recent Quadrennial Defense Review, which favored a long-range carrier-based strike aircraft. The Boeing drone was first designed as a land-based aircraft, and the Northrop plane was a carrier-based platform from its inception.

The MQ-8B Fire Scout vertical-takeoff-and-landing UAV is being designed to perform intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for the Navy’s new Littoral Combat Ships’ three mission modules, designed for surface warfare, antisubmarine warfare and mine warfare. The drone can spend up to five hours on station at a range of 110 nautical miles with a 600-pound lift capacity. The system conducted its first flight in December 2006 at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, Md. The Fire Scout is more than 9 feet tall, weighs more than 3,000 pounds and can travel at speeds greater than 125 knots.

Northrop officials said recently that there is potential to leverage Fire Scout on other Navy ships as well.

Mike Fuqua, the company’s business development director for the drone, told Navy Times that he believed Arleigh Burke-class destroyers are the best ships to use Fire Scout because the drone complements the ships’ SH-60 Seahawk helicopters.