Hot on the heels of the Air Force’s February withdrawal from the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) and the Navy’s takeover of the promising program, the attack drone is about to take another hit.
“[A] co-worker who has good friend in the congressional budget office says the UCAS-D (as they call J-UCAS now) is headed for a $200 million plus cut next year,” reports a Defense Tech source.
What this will mean for Boeing and Northrop Grumman (each of which is building demonstrators) remains to be seen.
Then there’s this puzzling piece of news from the Farnborough air show, as reported by Flight International:
The U.S. Navy has begun studying the need for a new stealthy strike aircraft — a mission that was once to have been performed by the A-12, cancelled in 1991. “They will do a formal analysis of alternatives at some point,” says Chris Chadwick, Boeing vice– president and general manager global strike systems.
This is another stealth strike aircraft on top of the Lockheed Martin F-35C Lightning? Will it be manned? Is this just another repackaging of N-UCAS, like what the Air Force did in turning J-UCAS into its new Long Range Strike study?
Color me confused.
–David Axe
man the A-12 would have been so cool. the mock-up that they did was awesome looking. hard to imagine why a plane so far ahead of it’s time would have been scrapped when it was so far into development.
Good Morning David,
What a way to start out the week. The F-35 according to articles in several Sunday Papers this past weekend is on the ropes. Already with a cost estimate of in excess of $100 million per unit in ’05 funds, the 2500 production mark now very unlikely and nobody is talking production before 2011 the F-35 may join the A-12 as good but no cigar. The sameguys who dumped the A-12 are still there for at least another two years, Cheney and Rumsfeld.
As you suggested the Navy is way ahead of the Air Force on unmanned combat air craft. The CV21 (X) project that is in design as I write this has determined that futire American Carries will only support five air frames vs. the current eleven. Navy Top Guns of the future will not get much farther then the ward room and a joy stick.
Here is a though for Brian and the rest who don’t want to see the future, Randy “Duke” Cunningham may go down in Naval History as the last “Navy Ace”.
Ah, what a way to start a week.
ALLONS,
Byron Skinner
From what I understood while working on the AX (then later called A/FX), the reason for the A-12 cancellation, other than WAY overrun costs, was that they simply could not build it. The structures sizing and aeroelasticity problems just could not be overcome.
The initial AX program was similar: deep strike, low observable, internal LGB carriage…what killed AFX was the F-18 mafia. Suddenly AX, a flying dump truck, was told it had to knife fight like an F-16, got stuck carrying tall-fins internal (making it HUGELY thick…folding fins weren’t allowed) plus AMRAAMs. We were told if it COULDN“T do all that then the F-18 was the winner, yet the F-18 couldn’t do a fraction of what we were expected to do. The AX was a helluva plane. The AFX was just another F-111.
I have noticed a number of articles on unmanned aircraft systems from a few prominent news sources that refer to these system’s flight vehicles as drones. Just for the record, these vehicles are not drones. The term is correctly applied to an aircraft that is used as an aerial target. A drone is usually a manned aircraft that has reached the end of its useful life and then modified and flown as an unmanned vehicle as a target for gunnery practice or other exercise purpose.
Anybody wonder why LockMart got the space deal? Can you say “Quid Pro Quo”?
Another example of congressional and military
shortsightedness. I do not belive that any A.I.
or remote can replace a human on site. However
as an adjunct these platform’s can be very effective. Ive read several “what if’s” in
military tech fiction and Im sold. Dale Brown’s
books get the point across very well. Can you
imagine being a pilot in a dogfight against
a fighter that can pull 20 G’s? My only question
is how do you keep the data link from being jammed? EMP’s are very effective and our satillites are pretty defenseless.
Mr. Marshall’s comments were good. The DataLink jamming problem is avoided by 2 methods: 1) Pencil-Point comms, as shown in public FCS slides, and 2) having intelligent control within the vehicle (which explains the change from RP to UA in UAV). The pilot is generally the most expensive and heaviest payload in the aircraft (gotta consider life-support systems in these budgets). The economics seem clear.