AUSSIE GAS GETS DRONE DEFENDERS

The Australian gov­ern­ment will start using American drones to keep watch over Oz’s oil and nat­ural gas reserves, CNN reports.
Tens of bil­lions of dol­lars in fos­sil fuels sits under Australia’s Northwest Shelf, off of the country’s west­ern coast. But pro­tect­ing the Shelf’s vast array of pipelines and plat­forms has been a task that’s beyond tricky. So Prime Minister John Howard’s gov­ern­ment has leased two U.S.-made pilot­less planes — the high-​​flying, long endurance Global Hawk and the Mariner, an ocean-​​going cousin of the Predator drone.
The UAV trial will oper­ate from Learmonth RAAF base near the West Australia town of Exmouth. But “mis­sion con­trol,” the Herald-​​Sun observes, “will be 2700km away in Adelaide’s north­ern sub­urbs, where a large sup­port crew will be sta­tioned at RAAF base Edinburgh.
“While no plans exist to arm the drones,” the paper notes, “they are capa­ble of fir­ing killer Hellfire mis­siles, used to deadly effect by the US against al-​​Qaida lead­ers in Afghanistan.“
The drone duo is just a first step for Howard’s gov­ern­ment, which “announced plans in February to spend up to $1 bil­lion on 10 mar­itime sur­veil­lance UAVs,” accord­ing to the Herald-​​Sun.
THERE’S MORE: “Russias Emergency Situations Ministry has deployed Israeli-​​made unmanned aer­ial vehi­cles, each equipped with the same sen­sors the Israeli mil­i­tary uses to col­lect intel­li­gence in the West Bank and Gaza Strip,” accord­ing to Defense News. “The Aerostar UAV sold to Russia is designed for day and night flights of more than eight hours, at alti­tudes of up to 15,000 feet.”

September 20th, 2004 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.