America’s fleet of 11 big-deck aircraft carriers just got a lot closer to becoming a lot more dangerous. On Friday afternoon, Northrop Grumman’s X-47B, a prototype for the Navy’s first carrier-capable killer drone, flew for the first time from Edwards Air Force Base in California.
“Taking off under hazy skies, the X-47B climbed to an altitude of 5,000 feet, flew several racetrack-type patterns, and landed safely at 2:38 PM PST,” Northrop crowed in a press release. “The flight provided test data to verify and validate system software for guidance and navigation, and the aerodynamic control of the tailless design.”
“Designing a tailless, fighter-sized unmanned aircraft from a clean sheet is no small feat,” Northrop veep Janis Pamiljans added. While omitting a plane’s tail makes it way more stealthy, it also makes it harder to control.
If Northrop and the Navy can prove the X-47 works over the planned, three-year demonstration program, combat-ready X-47s could begin flying off carrier decks before the end of the decade.
The benefits are clear. With far greater range than the Navy’s existing F/A-18 strike fighters, the X-47 would allow Navy carrier groups to sail farther from shore when launching air strikes, helping protect the priceless vessels from the increasingly dangerous anti-ship missiles being fielded by nations such as China. The X-47 would also be able to sneak through the defensive umbrella of today’s “Triple-Digit” anti-aircraft missiles.
For these reasons, the X-47 could prove “among the most fungible and useful platforms in America’s future defense portfolio,” Navy undersecretary Bob Work wrote in 2007, back when he was still a lowly analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, D.C.
Despite its enormous potential, the X-47 almost didn’t make it this far. The triangular drone was originally designed back in the early 2000s for the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System competition, which pitted the Northrop bot versus Boeing’s similar X-45. The winner would have joined the Navy and the Air Force. But in 2005, the Air Force abandoned the contest, and the X-47 and X-45 both wound up orphaned.
Thanks in part to Work’s lobbying, the Navy agreed to continue work on the X-47. (The X-45 survived, too, as a Boeing-funded effort.) As confidence in the new killer drone increased, so did the scope of — and funding for — its test program. In January, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates singled out the X-47 and other Navy drones as beneficiaries of billions of dollars in budgetary shifts.
Which isn’t to say the whole Navy is on board. Last month, Navy Vice Adm. Mark Fox told reporters he was skeptical that drones would be ready for carrier operations anytime soon. “Anything that takes off and lands on an aircraft carrier has to be pretty robust,” he said. “You test something in the desert and it works great. But the maritime world is a harsh and unforgiving environment.”
Plus, Fox added, “there’s still an enormous amount of merit in having somebody in the cockpit making decisions about whether you employ ordnance or not.”
But Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Gary Roughead, Fox’s boss, calls the shots — and he said last fall that he wanted the X-47 or a similar drone on carriers before 2018. That’s probably just do-able under the current schedule, which sees the X-47 fly off a carrier and refuel mid-air by 2013.
Even so, Roughead agrees with Fox on one key point: the Navy still needs old-school manned fighters, too — specifically, the F-35C variant of the Joint Strike Fighter. “As rapidly as we want to engage with the unmanned system on carriers,” Roughead said, “we’re also moving forward with JSF.”
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