This is some month for the Navy’s next-generation drones. First it launched an autonomous robot off the deck of an aircraft carrier. Now its very high-flying new spy drone has completed its first test flight.
The MQ-4C Triton took off today for the first time from a Palmdale, California airfield, a major step in the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance program. Northrop Grumman, which manufactured the 130.9-foot-wingspan drone, said the maiden voyage lasted an hour and a half. The Navy even announced it via Twitter.
“First flight represents a critical step in maturing Triton’s systems before operationally supporting the Navy’s maritime surveillance mission around the world,” Capt. James Hoke, Triton’s program manager, said in a statement.
If the Triton looks familiar, it should. It’s a souped-up version of the Air Force’s old reliable spy drone, Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk. The Navy’s made some modifications to the airframe and the sensors it carries to ensure it can spy on vast swaths of ocean, from great height. (It’s unarmed, if you were wondering.)
The idea is for the Triton to achieve altitudes of nearly 53,000 feet — that’s 10 miles up — where it will scan 2,000 nautical miles at a single robotic blink. (Notice that wingspan is bigger than a 737′s.) Its sensors, Northrop boasts, will “detect and automatically classify” ships, giving captains a much broader view of what’s on the water than radar, sonar and manned aircraft provide. Not only that, Triton is a flying communications relay station, bouncing “airborne communications and information sharing capabilities” between ships. And it can fly about 11,500 miles without refueling.
The Navy wants 68 of these aircraft. But the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance Program hasn’t all been shining successes. Almost a year ago, a Global Hawk that the Air Force loaned the Navy to experiment with at Pax River Air Station went down in Maryland. Northrop says it’ll put the Triton through additional flight tests before sending it to Pax River later this year.
While most of the military has said it’s got enough drones, thanks, the Navy is moving forward with at least two advanced drone programs. Aside from the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, there is a plan to launch and land autonomous armed drones from aircraft carriers. The demonstrator vehicle for that program, the X-47B, took its first flight from a carrier deck at sea last week, and is scheduled to make its first arrested carrier landing by the end of the summer. (It even did some touch-and-goes from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush, too.)
Like the X-47B, the Triton is different from the Air Force’s drones: it’s autonomous. Its flight operations are a matter of executing a flight pattern thanks to lines of software code and GPS, rather than a pilot in a remote air-conditioned box holding a throttle.
“Replacing our aging surveillance aircraft with a system like Triton,” Hoke noted, “will allow us to monitor ocean areas significantly larger with greater persistence.” And with humans relatively removed from its operations, even by drone standards. LINK
Posts
