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Home » Drones » Army Eyes Helo-​​Drone

Army Eyes Helo-​​Drone

fire-flight-web.jpg

The Army is con­sid­er­ing send­ing a rev­o­lu­tion­ary new kind of unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle to Iraq that can hover at 20,000 feet over the bat­tle­field for more than eight hours, trans­mit­ting infrared and opti­cal imagery to com­man­ders on the ground.

The MQ-​​8B Fire Scout tac­ti­cal unmanned aer­ial vehi­cle sys­tem — which only a few years ago seemed all but dead — is one sys­tem Army Vice-​​Chief of Staff Gen. Richard Cody requested this sum­mer as a pos­si­ble answer to an urgent bat­tle­field need for unmanned sur­veil­lance in Iraq.

Officials with Fire Scout man­u­fac­turer Northrop Grumman told Military​.com the Army could make a deci­sion on whether to field the ver­ti­cal take-​​off and land­ing drone by the end of August.

If all goes accord­ing to plan, the com­pany could field as many as eight MQ-​​8Bs to units in Iraq by mid-​​2008.

“We want to get the Army to fly the Fire Scout as early as pos­si­ble,” said Rick Ludwig, Northrop Grumman’s direc­tor of busi­ness devel­op­ment for UAV systems.

The Army is inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy like the Fire Scout — which is based on the manned Schweizer 333 heli­copter — for its Future Combat Systems Class IV UAV, one of the few drone sys­tems to sur­vive major Army bud­get cuts in next year’s Defense appro­pri­a­tions request.

While the Navy is forg­ing ahead on a ship-​​board ver­sion of the Fire Scout, the Army has yet to decide on some of the crit­i­cal hard­ware and soft­ware con­fig­u­ra­tions for the FCS ver­sion, Ludwig said.

The Fire Scout was orig­i­nally intended to replace the Marine Corps RQ-​​2A Pioneer sur­veil­lance drone but was shelved in 2002 in favor of the RQ-​​7B Shadow.

The Navy breathed new life into the Fire Scout pro­gram in 2004 to aug­ment its fleet of SH-​​60 Sea Hawks on future sur­face ships. The Army began look­ing at the MQ-​​8 in 2003 for its FCS drone fleet.

According to Joe Emerson, Northrop Grumman’s FCS drone pro­gram man­ager, the Army wants its FCS-​​capable Fire Scout to have aer­ial mine detec­tion capa­bil­ity and tac­ti­cal sig­nals intel­li­gence hardware.

An Iraq deploy­ment in the near term, how­ever, would include infrared sen­sors and electro-​​optical cam­eras to give com­man­ders a birds-​​eye view of the bat­tle­field. The main stick­ing point for the Army ver­sion remains which flight con­trol sys­tem the ser­vice wants to use for the drone, Ludwig added.

“They still have to decide what they want in it,” he said.

The Navy is on track to field the Fire Scout in the anti-​​mine, anti-​​sub and intel­li­gence gath­er­ing con­fig­u­ra­tions in 2009 aboard Littoral Combat Ships, Ludwig said. Northrop Grumman is also work­ing on ways to arm the drone with anti-​​ship muni­tions, includ­ing a vari­a­tion of the bril­liant anti-​​armor muni­tion, which can orbit autonomously in search of a tar­get after launch.

– Christian

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August 8th, 2007 | Drones | 366542 Comments »http://defensetech.org/2007/08/08/army-eyes-helo-drone/Army+Eyes+Helo-Drone2007-08-08+12%3A08%3A04Ward You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

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  1. Roy Smith says:
    August 8, 2007 at 8:15 am

    This could be set up like the Armed Reconnaissance Helicopter that con­gress & the Pentagon seem to have a hard time approv​ing​.It could also be con­trolled by one of the pilots in an Apache Helicopter.This is a good idea & I won­der why it took so long to get imple­mented? It can’t be old guard resis­tance because they can’t seem to get the ARH up & run­ning either.I have a con­spir­acy the­ory about this but I don’t want to get banned.

    Reply
  2. Rick says:
    August 8, 2007 at 11:03 am

    Will it be cleared to carry ord­nance in Iraq? I didn’t see any men­tion in the article.

    Reply
  3. Christian Lowe says:
    August 8, 2007 at 11:13 am

    Rick,
    Though the Fire Scout has been tested to fire ord­nance already, my under­stand­ing is that there are no plans to arm it for the Iraq deploy­ment. But, that said, I sup­pose any­thing is possible.

    Reply
  4. John R. Manis says:
    August 8, 2007 at 10:21 pm

    ON jan­u­ary 5, 2007 I sent an email pro­posal of a new Irag war stragedy to President Bush of deploy­ing ScanEagle mini-​​drones by the thou­sands for sat­u­ra­tion sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance of bat­tle­field regions in Irag and to also aid the civil war sit­u­a­tion there. Squadrons of these drones can be deployed to act like large heli­copter drones capa­ble of being hov­er­ing sur­veil­lance air­craft but deployed much more effi­ciently by hav­ing radial arms of lines of ScanEagle Mini-​​drones drones fly­ing coax­i­ally around a com­mon fixed axis point and in this way can act to be sat­u­ra­tion surveilance/​reconnaisssance air­craft that can blan­ket cover hun­dreds and even thou­sands of square miles of Irag topograhy of bat­tle­field regions and also many square miles of city and coun­try­side regions of Irag as see­ing eyes to spot the enemy when for instance plant­ing road­side bombs; and these ScanEagle Drones can even man­age the Irag civil war fight­ing by spot­ting bands of civil war killer squads roam­ing the streets of Irag cities mur­der­ing hun­dreds of inno­cent civil­ians nightly which these mur­der­ous killer groups con­sider their foes for polit­i­cal dom­i­nance estab­lish­ment of power in Irag. Rotating radial arms of hun­dreds or even thou­sands of ScanEagle Mini-​​drones can quickly turn the course of the Irag war for America to win because these said ScanEagle mini-​​drones deployed as out­lined here will make the pre­vi­ously invis­i­ble enemy now vis­i­ble by such wide­spread blan­ket sat­u­ra­tion surveillance/​reconnaisssance effiency to now see what the enemy is up to and get­ting bet­ter at it with each days expe­ri­ence of log­ging the odd tracks of the enemy that can be done much more effe­ciently than that of a few large heli­copter drones ever could. Also because the long radial arms of the cir­cu­lar flight of many hun­dreds of mini-​​drones can as squadron groups also imme­di­ately mass drift to any 360 dregree course of flight nec­es­sary while also hav­ing the capa­bil­ity of instantly expand­ing or con­tract­ing the drones radial flight arms inward and down­ward to more densely cover a ground bat­tle site with heav­ily con­densed fire­power, or upward and out­ward to imme­di­ately have a much more broad cov­er­age of ground sur­veil­lance and recon­nais­sance when required to aid our ground troops. Also too, a large heli­copter drone requires much more fuel to stay aloft and only has a flight time of 9 hours whereas ScanEagles require much less fuel and have a flight time of 17 hours. And 20 or more mini-​​drone ScanEagles can be pur­chased at the cost of a sin­gle large heli­copter drone. Therefor the loss by gun­fire of one ScanEagle is much more afford­able and makes lit­tle dif­fer­ence to oper­a­tion of a squadron of a hun­dred or more ScanEagles than does the loss and of one Large heli­copter drone leav­ing the Irag sky empty of sur­veil­lance and fire­power for our ground troops. I hope and pray that the right peo­ple see this mes­sage who can make the deci­sion choice to put ScanEagles into the skies of Irag.

    Reply
  5. john says:
    August 10, 2007 at 8:09 am

    Any, ANY tool that can end this war and get our troops out vic­to­ri­ously is ok with me. I am incensed by our lead­ers in the house drag­ging their feet at every turn want­ing to lose. I see this coun­try as a coun­try of win­ners and a loss is not accept­able. Our war fight­ers are doing their jobs now it’s time for the rest of the elected vagabonds not on board to get on. America, love it or leave it!
    Semper Fi.

    Reply
  6. txzen says:
    August 10, 2007 at 3:51 pm

    I really like the idea of sur­veil­lance sat­u­ra­tion. If you have eyes on your con­voy routes you know when some­one is dig­ging on the road. I just won­der how pos­si­ble it is to watch miles and miles of road but if they could it would save lives. I guess some­thing like this could fly routes and try to set off IEDs with cell phone sig­nals or walkie talkie sig­nals safely from hun­dreds of feet in the air.

    Reply
  7. Dennis says:
    August 13, 2007 at 3:03 pm

    I am unsure what this tech­nol­ogy is going to offer that the exist­ing winged, unmanned sur­veil­lance tech­nol­ogy already does.
    I under­stand why the Navy is inter­ested, they can run many of these off of small and medium ships for anti-​​sub war­fare and coastal recon­nais­sance.
    The Marines (and Seals) could use them for over­head eyes while per­form­ing coastal mis­sions.
    I just think the Army is wast­ing their time on this one.

    Reply
  8. Tiffany jwelery says:
    May 26, 2009 at 11:23 am

    Any, ANY tool that can end this war and get our troops out vic­to­ri­ously is ok with me. I am incensed by our lead­ers in the house drag­ging their feet at every turn want­ing to lose. I see this coun­try as a Tiffany jwel­ery coun­try of win­ners and a loss is not accept­able. Our war fight­ers are doing their jobs now it’s time for the rest of the elected vagabonds not on board to get on. America, love it or leave it!
    Semper Fi.

    Reply

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