Predator’s Maverick Maker

The Pentagon has been toy­ing around with limited-​​run, pro­to­type drones for decades. So how did the U.S. mil­i­tary sud­denly have a small fleet of Predator robotic planes at the ready after 9/​11? Aviation Week says the answer lies with Tom Cassidy, the mav­er­ick chief of Predator-​​maker General Atomics.

“We’re going to tell General Atomics to build every Predator they can pos­si­bly build,” replied [Air Force chief of staff] Gen. John P. Jumper, refer­ring to the small San Diego com­pany that devel­oped the air­craft.
Tom Cassidy isn’t wait­ing for the paper­work to go through. Cassidy, the pres­i­dent and CEO of General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, is expand­ing the Predator pro­duc­tion line, even build­ing eight addi­tional Predator Bs — a more capa­ble ver­sion of the air­craft — with­out orders. “They’ll pro­cras­ti­nate for three years,” he says of his mil­i­tary cus­tomers. “Then when they want to buy, they think it’s like going down to the Ford deal­er­ship and pick­ing one off the lot.“
Such blunt talk has won him his share of crit­ics, but the 72-​​year-​​old retired rear admi­ral and vet­eran fighter pilot from The Bronx doesn’t seem to care. The Predator, ini­tially shunned by the mil­i­tary ser­vices, has won wide acclaim as a sim­ple, adapt­able air­craft that can pro­vide cru­cial recon­nais­sance and strike capa­bil­ity for the bar­gain price of less than $5 mil­lion a copy, sen­sors included.
The remotely piloted air­craft, which car­ries two Hellfire mis­siles and can stay aloft for more than a day at a time, stunned the world with its abil­ity to hunt down and kill Al Qaeda and Taliban oper­a­tives in Afghanistan and the Middle East…
It was Cassidy’s risky “build it and they will come” strat­egy — devel­op­ing and build­ing air­craft ahead of orders — that proved deci­sive fol­low­ing the Sept. 11, 2001, ter­ror­ist attacks. When U.S. forces were unex­pect­edly and very sud­denly ordered to rout guerilla-​​like forces from moun­tain­ous Afghanistan, Hellfire-​​equipped Predators weren’t just a con­cept on the draw­ing board. They were in production.

May 31st, 2005 | Drones | Comments Off Both comments and pings are currently closed.