Looking across the production line at Northrop Grumman‘s [NOC] Mississippi facility, it’s hard for anyone to tell the difference between the Army and Navy variants of the MQ-8B Fire Scout.

But the differences are there and they extend beyond payloads and capabilities.

The official Army program is the Future Combat System (FCS) Class 4 Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV), a component of the Army’s effort to connect sensors, platforms and weapons to soldiers.

The airframes that arrive at the Moss Point, Miss., facility from Schweizer Aircraft [UTX] are identical; there is no difference between the Army and Navy Fire Scouts, Doug Fronius, Navy Fire Scout program director, told Defense Daily in a recent interview.

“In fact the ones we are building now, all the airframes are being bought on a Navy contract with Army money sent over to the Navy. And then they are being delivered to the Army,” he said.

But there is a huge difference in the two programs, from Northrop Grumman’s perspective, in how they interact with the customer, Mike Fuqua, Fire Scout business development manager, said during the same interview.

On the Navy side, PMA-266, Navy & Marine Corps Multi-Mission Tactical Unmanned Aerial Systems program office, at Naval Air System Command, is the customer. On the Army side, the customer is the Boeing [BA]- SAIC [SAI] team that manages FCS.

Under the FCS contract, Northrop Grumman provides the aircraft and Boeing and SAIC formulate the ground control segment, provide radios, provide data links, and any sort of sensors, Fuqua said. “All of that will be provided to us. So it’s a different kind of relationship on that side of the house.”

While the airframe and engine are 100 percent similar, it is the big ticket items that make the Army and Navy Fire Scouts unique to each service, he added.

The Army has different radios, a different communications and control segment payload, a different payload interface computer, a different ground station, and different data links, Fuqua said.

“When it comes to support equipment, training both maintenance and pilots, all of those things are synergistic…they can be used by both services,” he noted.

The Army has bought eight Fire Scouts, seven of which are at the Moss Point site.

“Three are finished, up to a point. [They are] complete with everything we are under contract for, but we have not received any of the GFE (government furnished equipment) from the other parts of the program,” Fuqua said.

Because FCS is a research, development, test and evaluation (RDT&E) effort, it could be a few years before equipment for various pieces of FCS, including Fire Scout, are ready.

“The Army program’s first flight isn’t even until end of 2010 or early 2011,” Fuqua said. “But they have the eight airframes sitting at Moss Point.”

“They are complete enough to sit there with the engine running on the ramp, being controlled by the vehicle management computer,” Fronius added. “But they have no payloads, or communications or ground stations to go with them.”

The Army Fire Scouts could be outfitted with a Navy type of system, but Fronius noted that that would not be keeping with the architecture of FCS.

The Army VTUAVs were built all the way through to an engine run, a flight clearance event, Fuqua said. “So we conducted two of those at Moss Point with Army number one and number two.”

A decision was made not to continue with engine run events on any other Army Fire Scouts beyond number two, he added.

“The program decided not to run the engine after number two because as soon as you run it, you put fuel in all of the fuel lines…the fuel tank…throughout the engine, and you then have to go in an purge everything and do preservative action,” Fuqua explained. “If they just finish it and don’t run it, it is much easier to preserve everything for storage.”

The FCS program decided to conduct the engine runs on its first two Fire Scouts to prove out the process and prove everything works, Fuqua added.

Further engine runs were then deferred until the aircraft are pulled out of storage for phase two of production and installation of the rest of the equipment, he said.

“So right now, the Army program is set up at Moss Point to assemble vehicles at a very slow pace, to stretch over several years, so a small team of people can stay employed continuously, until the equipment starts arriving from FCS,” Fuqua said. “[And then we’d] start cycling all eight vehicles back through the process.”