PATUXENT RIVER, Md.–The Navy’s MQ-4C Triton landed at Naval Air Station Patuxent River on Thursday, completing its maiden flight across the country and moving closer to sensor payload testing.
The Triton had earlier departed from Palmdale, Calif., where contractor
Northrop Grumman [NOC] builds the aircraft, and where they have been undergoing airframe flight testing to meet key benchmarks ahead of plans to start installing and testing the payload suite.
“Today we brought Triton home to the center of research, development, test and evaluation for naval aviation,” said Rear Adm. Mat Winter, the program executive officer for unmanned aviation and strike at Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR), which is headquartered at NAS Patuxent River.
“The testing performed here over the next few years is critical to delivering a capability that will provide our warfighter an unparalleled awareness of the maritime environment in locations across the globe,” he added.
The Triton arrived at the air station minutes before 8 a.m. after completing an 11-hour journey that covered 3,290 nautical miles, NAVAIR said. The aircraft flew along the southern U.S. border, over the Gulf of Mexico and across Florida before navigating up the Atlantic Coast and climbing above 50,000 feet to avoid airliners.
The Tritons are a derivative of the Air Force’s Global Hawk, designed to fly more than 24 hours at a time and at altitudes reaching 60,000 feet to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance.
The first three MQ-4Cs are expected to reach initial operational capability in 2017 after undergoing 2,000 hours of flight testing, NAVAIR said.
The Navy plans to buy 68 Tritons for maritime surveillance and to operate in conjunction with the manned P-8A Poseidons built by Boeing [BA].
The Navy has previously said it intends to first deploy “orbits” of Tritons to the Middle East in 2016, about one year ahead of the initial operational capability timeframe. An orbit consists of about four of the drones, depending on mission requirements.
Tritons will be subsequently deployed to the Asia-Pacific region and then the Mediterranean. They are also slated for stationing on the eastern and western U.S. coasts.
Several years ago the Navy acquired five Global Hawks from the Air Force to experiment with them in the Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, or BAMS, program, and some were deployed to Bahrain, the headquarters for the Navy’s Fifth Fleet.
Australia announced earlier this year that it planned to buy Tritons, but did not say how many.