You’re an Army helicopter pilot. You’re up in your Apache, and you see something suspicious. But you need information from further than what your own sensors can provide. In the future, the Army will let you direct a Predator-like drone to zoom in, right from the air.
As it stands right now, the Army’s larger drones, like the Grey Eagle — a version of the famous Predator— can send video feeds to Apaches, much as they send video to soldiers below. But Apache pilots can’tdirect the drones, just receive information passively. Tim Owings, the civilian deputy head of the Army’s drone-development program, says that’s going to change.
Tomorrow’s Apache operators “will add command and control” over the Grey Eagles, Owings said on a conference call for bloggers Wednesday morning. They’ll “be able to see the image and control the aircraft from the cockpit of the Apache.” With some exceptions: while the Grey Eagle has four Hellfire missiles affixed to it, the Apache pilot won’t be able to fire them. The remote sensor and command capability from the Grey Eagles can help an Apache “spot a target,” which the armed helicopter can then attack itself. That’ll come in handy for units like Task Force ODIN, the Army surveillance team spying on Afghan insurgents, which fly both drones and helicopters; Special Operations Forces teams that do the same already have their own Grey Eagles.
And that gives a new definition to “remote piloting,” the preferred term of art for drone controlling. “Unmanned” doesn’t really cover it, since human beings are intimately involved in directing drones. In fact, it usually takes two people to operate a single Predator-class drone. Now the Army is saying that, in limited situations, one pilot will be able to fly both the Apache and the Grey Eagle at the same time.
The Grey Eagle-Apache command system is undergoing testing now. Owings said to expect it to be ready for display by September at Utah’s Dugway Proving Ground, where the Army will show off its Manned/Unmanned System Integration Concept, which includes a “small handheld controller” that will get soldiers on the ground to control the Army’s fleet of tinier, hand-launched drones like the Raven.
But the Grey Eagle, recently sent to Afghanistan, is what really has Owings excited. The “super-important” drone provides “wider-area surveillance sensors” than the Army’s smaller drones and flies for over 24 hours, while the Army’s 29-foot-wingspan Hunter can only stay aloft around 15. And it can be networked in to the sensors of the rest of the drone fleet, to “increase dissemination from our other stuff [and] pass information from the Grey Eagle to the ground.” Defense Secretary Robert Gates is sufficiently impressed: he greenlighted the Army to speed up buying the drone.
And the Army may ultimately decide to let Apache aviators fire the Grey Eagle’s missiles. When Danger Room asked if that was a capability the Army would give its helicopters, Owings didn’t say no. He said “not yet.”
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