Australia Done, Global Hawk Heads to South America, Germany

Having successfully completed its first overseas deployment, Northrop Grumman's Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle is now being prepared for missions to Latin America and Berlin.

Talks between the German and U.S. governments have begun to pave the way for the mission to Germany, says Carl Johnson, Northrop Grumman's program manager for the high altitude endurance UAV. As part of the deployment, Global Hawk would make an appearance at the ILA Berlin air show in May.

The aircraft configuration would be the standard version the U.S. Air Force current flies. However, informal talks also have been held about installing a German electronic intelligence payload on the aircraft.

Before then Global Hawk's attention will turn to busting drugs. The U.S. Congress gave the Pentagon money for a counter-drug demonstration, supporting the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees the U.S. military's anti-drug missions.

As part of the operation scheduled next March through May, Global Hawk's capabilities also will grow. The system already has two radar surveillance modes, a ground target tracking capability, and a maritime target tracking mode, which was added for Australia. For the Southern Command missions-to be flown out of Edwards AFB, California-an air-to-air moving target detection mode will be developed. Raytheon, which developed the radar, plans to call on its fire radar engineers to help develop software to allow Global Hawk to detect Cessna-sized targets. Range performance hasn't been fully determined.

The expanding demands on Global Hawk follow the six-week deployment to RAAF Edinburgh near Adelaide, Australia. During that time it flew 11 of 12 planned missions, with one having to be scrapped while a software fault was fixed. But the aircraft still completed 238.5 mission hours compared with 261 planned. The aircraft spent another 45.7 hrs in ferry flights from and back to Edwards.

Among the capabilities added for the mission were maritime surveillance capability, and a Litton LR-100 electronic intelligence payload that was used to cue other sensors. In one mission, the LR-100 was able to detect a 40-foot vessel at 170 km. A total of 1,988 images were collected during the deployment.

Australia has indicated it is looking to buy a small number of Global Hawks or a similar system in the near future, making that country potentially the first export customer for the aircraft.