Predator C, as revealed today, is clearly a stealth design. Internal weapon bays: check. Aligned wing edges: check. Serpentine inlet and flattened exhaust: check.
What people sometime's don't realize is that General Atomics - parent company of GA-Aeronautical Systems Inc. - has a division that specializes in stealth-related materials. Radar-absorbent edges, coatings for inlet ducts, and bandpass radomes for the satellite antenna and other apertures are all needed, and some or all of them could have been made in-house.
What's more interesting and esoteric yet is that there are links between GA-ASI and work that was done in the prehistoric days of stealth, years before Ben Rich, Denys Overholser and Have Blue.
In the 1960s, San Diego was one of the leading centers of stealth research. Teledyne Ryan Aeronautical (now part of Northrop Grumman) was adapting Firebee drones into Lightning Bug reconnaissance aircraft, using successively more complex stealth materials. It culminated in the all-new AQM-91 Firefly or Compass Arrow.
USAF
Late in the 1970s, too, a group of San Diego-based Martin-Marietta stealth engineers (the company was interested in LO for missile warheads) joined forces with financial backers to form a stealth-specialist company called Global Analytics. In 1983, they attempted to go public, and the spooks in the Pentagon had a fit. Instead, the company was discreetly sold to Alcoa and became Alcoa Defense Systems.
Alcoa sold the unit to McDonnell Douglas around 1988, and Macs later sold it to Martin-Marietta - and what happened to it in the Lockheed Martin merger, I'm not sure.
However, the last on-the-record address for Global Analytics that I can find is 16761 Via del Campo Court in Rancho Bernardo - which, oddly enough, happens to be the original HQ of GA-ASI.
Now, all you would-be photo interpreters out there - look at the big square building immediately to the south-west of the GA-ASI plant. It has no windows. In fact, it is a big, quite sophisticated indoor radar cross-section (RCS) test range, commissioned by Alcoa Defense Systems and completed in the McDonnell Douglas period. It belongs to ATK today - but it would not be surprising if it were not available for rent, either by GA-ASI or the neighbors on the other side - an ex-TRA group that's now part of Northrop Grumman.
As Mary Alice Young might put it, you never quite know what secrets are hidden behind the bland walls of suburbia.
