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home > April 21, 2008 issue > article
Switches with wings: UAVs as comm relays
Giant blimps are not the only vehicles capable of stratospheric flight. Fixed-wing aircraft such as the Lockheed U-2 have done it for decades.
What they haven’t done, however, is stay there at length.
Enter Global Observer, a Joint Capability
Technology Demonstration project run by the
Defense Department’s Office of Advanced
Systems and Concepts. Program officials plan
a 2009 test flight, for five to seven days, of a
liquid-hydrogen-powered, unmanned aerial
vehicle capable of lifting 400 pounds to about
60,000 feet.
Proponents say the UAV effort has one big
advantage over airship projects such as the
Missile Defense Agency’s High Altitude Airship
(HAA). “The technology is pretty mature — the
endurances are certainly much shorter — but
it’s a demonstrated capability,” said Dyke Wetherington, deputy director of
unmanned warfare at DOD’s Office of Acquisition, Technology and Logistics.
“In the near term, I don’t think we’ll see an operational capability for a
high-altitude airship,” whereas Global Observer could be ready for production
by 2011, Wetherington said.
A Global Observer concept of operations could embrace both tactical and
strategic use, Wetherington said. Tactically, it could act as a communications
router and conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance
tasks over a war theater.
Strategically, it could act as a surrogate satellite, relaying data gathered
by lower-altitude UAVs down to the ground.
The UAV’s short-endurance time — relative,
at least, to the still theoretical HAA — doesn’t
disqualify Global Observer from a strategic
role, Wetherington said. Five to seven days of
flight doesn’t sound like much compared to
HAA, he said, which would stay airborne for
about a year, but “it’s five to seven times
what we have with any platform today.”
Generating one mission every week for a single
aircraft is a fairly low operational tempo,
he said.
Global Observer would cost “much less than
$10 million apiece,” Wetherington said. A
robust communications routing capability on board would be about another
$1 million or $2 million.
The Navy also has a high-altitude project, although the Broad Area
Maritime Surveillance platform would fly lower, at altitudes of about
40,000 feet.
The Navy released a request for proposals for system development and
demonstration and low-rate initial production phases in February 2007.
The service forecasts initial operating capability by 2014.
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