Every Army battalion commander, Air Force targeting cell and special operations team in Iraq wants access to a Predator drone at all times. The demand for these versatile little birds has skyrocketed in recent years. To meet the demand, General Atomics is rolling Predators off the production line as fast as it can. But there’s a mismatch on the Air Force side of things. The Predator squadrons have suffered chronic manpower shortages, meaning they’ve got the birds, but no one to fly them.
It’s a matter of planning. The Air Force didn’t foresee just how popular Predator would be, so it didn’t lay the groundwork for a rapid expansion of Predator infrastructure. Now the service is playing catch-up, struggling to meet warfighter’s requirements for on-station Predators while training up new operators and forming new squadrons to fly factory-fresh aircraft. It’s a huge mess.
“I learned a lot from Predator and what they were doing,” says Col. Christopher Jella, commander of the new 18th Reconnaissance Squadron at Beale Air Force Base, Calif. This year the 18th became that second operational squadron to fly the Global Hawk, Predator’s high-altitude, long-endurance, unarmed cousin. According to Jella, the Global Hawk community has had none of the Predator’s problems. The two Global Hawk squadrons are, if anything, over-staffed. “We’ve gotten ahead of the wavefront.“
It helps that the Global Hawk community has fewer aircraft and needs fewer operators. Still, Jella explains, proper planning is vital when you’re standing up any new system: “We said several years ago, this system is coming, it’s got a lot of steam behind it. I can see where the production line drops airplanes. I said we need to get ahead of this. So I started hiring folks two years ago and bringing them here.“
Predator and Global Hawk promise to greatly improve the U.S. military’s ability to get intel into the right hands at the right time — but only if the Air Force can keep operators in seats and birds in the air. The service has plans to iron out Predator’s problems, according to Pentagon spokespeople. The plan seems to include throwing a lot of money at the problem. For the sakes of all those battalion commanders and their soldiers on the ground in Iraq, I hope it works.
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Global Hawk is also quite a bit more expensive to fly than Predator.
“The Predator is powered by a four cylinder Rotax engine requiring 100 octane aviation fuel type 100 LL Avgas with a capacity of
405 litres.“
The Global Hawk is “powered by a single Allison
AE3007H turbofan engine” and carries 2270 gallons of JP-8 fuel.
–from AFCESA Technical Order 00-105E-9
…not to mention the maintenance and operational costs.
Good Morning Folks,
I read this a little differently, maybe. I see that the Air Force has way to many fighter pilots and not enough UAV/UCAV operators. This story with the one a couple on entries back about trying to recycle the F-15C into a ground attack platform clearly indicates culture shock is taking place in the Air Force.
With Predator now a “Gun Slinger” of choice and Global Hawk a successful “Eye in the Sky” the future of the Air Force is with the unmanned platforms. Putting geeks in the seats at Nellis and Beal is more cost effective then putting a million dollar fighter pilot at risk from a “Wal-Mart” sholder fired SAM missile.
The unexpected early success’s of the X-45 Air Force and the X-47 Navy points to the future for the ground attack mission. For once DoD programs were cancelled because they were successful, not even the fighter mafia in the Pebtagon can ignore the results.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
Imagine downsizing the emerging laser technology & designing it to operationally fit into this Global Hawk platform. I can visualize it’s possible use in our combat against IEDs, & terrorist operations in the near future…observing, identifying, site spotting, & obliterating them from one aerial platform, no threat to any plane pilot or crew, & most probably prove to be most cost effective to the “bean counters”.…
Global Hawk will not be armed, for diplomtic reasons; its use in situations other nations would not allow the use of an “armed” drone in outweighs the benefits of strapping weapons on it.
However, nothing says that it can’t provide constant target updates from its radar via weapon data link to the 200 SDBs a pair of B-1s just dropped on the Chinese invasion fleet or whatever from 60km away…
Things like the weapon data link need to be watched closely, they have the potential, if truly hard to spoof or jam, to wipe out large formations in a very short period of time. Throw in laser cannons, and the AF might just be sitting pretty at the end of the day.
The MQ1, RQ1, Predator is the Only drone that actually carries its Missions out fully. I work on the predators and
I think the Air Force has a problem because they are trying to fighter pilots in a rather dull atmosphere. Fighter pilots don’t want to fly drones, its like taking a huge step backward. Once you drive a fast car you don’t trade it in for a Volkswagon Bug, its not exciting to you anymore. The Army and Navy are using enlisted folks and having no problem, the billets are sought after, why because its exciting and new. I have also read that they pull them from tours to do UAV pilot training, I see human factors issues when pilots are disgruntled over being forced into a UAV job. From something they like doing “real flying“
The Air Farce might figure it out.
Are you serious the Global hawk is so much faster and has such a much longer endurence rate. the global hawk is the future. we may not have FMV but we will n time. yes you do have 2 samll hell fires but in time our much bigger much faster UAV will have missles 5x’s the size of a hell fire!