The Navy official steering a program to develop a system of unmanned maritime surveillance aircraft said yesterday he is “fairly confident” the effort will heed a schedule stretching from a preliminary review this winter to full capability in 2019.
The Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) unmanned aerial system (UAS) developed by Northrop Grumman [NOC] will undergo 14 preliminary design reviews (PDR) of subsystems this year before a PDR of the entire setup during the winter, possibly in January, said Capt. Robert Dishman, program manager for the Navy’s Persistent Maritime Unmanned Aircraft Systems Program Office. The first of the 14 BAMS subsystems, for its maritime-surveillance radar, went through a PDR last week, he said at a Washington conference on unmanned systems hosted by the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International.
Projected key dates following the PDR include a critical design review in the winter of 2010/2011, first flight in 2012, Milestone C low-rate-initial-production entry in 2013, initial operational capability (IOC) in 2015, and full operational capability (FOC) in 2019, he said.
“We just did an integrated baseline review of the state of risk assessment and we’re fairly confident that we will meet those dates,” Dishman told reporters during a briefing. He said the Navy will “continue to manage the program aggressively” and is “in Northrop’s knickers.”
The BAMS network of unmanned aircraft will be used for long-dwell, all-weather, day-night surveillance of littoral and open-ocean areas to detect, track, and identify maritime surface targets.
“Lots of capability (will be) coming to the Navy (via BAMS) that we do not have today,” Dishman said, including 55,000 hours of sensor coverage over the world’s oceans every year. The future system will help counter piracy off the horn of Africa, he said.
BAMS is intended to work with the future P-8 Poseidon Multi-mission Maritime Aircraft (MMA), the successor to the P-3 Orion, and the EPX next-generation spy plane, which will replace the EP-3 ARIES aircraft.
BAMS’s 2019 FOC date is important, Dishman said.
“That’s a key date, because that’s the full operational capability of MMA as well,” he said. “So by 2019 the Navy wants to get out of the P-3 business, not (use just) a standard airplane anymore, and now (use) a complement of the manned and unmanend platform, both with the FOC at the same time”
The BAMS aircraft is based on the Global Hawk drone Northrop Grumman builds for the Air Force. Dishman detailed how the future Navy planes will be unique, with features such as more widespread maritime-surveillance radar coverage for detecting moving ships along all sides of the aircraft.
BAMS program officials determined the sense-and-avoid radar originally planned for the aircraft is not adequate, so Northrop Grumman is collecting proposals from industry for a replacement radar, Dishman said. The Navy would like to have that due-regard radar in time for subsystem PDR in the November timeframe, he said.
After Northrop Grumman won the development contract for BAMS UAS contract from the Navy in April 2008, a competing team made up of Lockheed Martin [LMT] and General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA ASI) filed an unsuccessful protest with government auditors. Boeing [BA] also competed for the contract.