Reducing the manpower required to operate drones is critical for making them more affordable and appealing to the Pentagon at a time when budgets are being cut, a senior Northrop Grumman [NOC] executive said recently.
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) need to carry systems more capable of sifting through data to scale back the number of humans involved in evaluating information provided by UAVs, said Gerard Dufresne, Northrop Grumman’s vice president and general manager for unmanned systems.
“It’s just crazy to have that many people processing data when we can have machines doing more of it on board and sending more of the critical decision making information down to the right people rather than having to have a bunch of humans in the loop,” he said.
Requiring humans in high numbers muddies the cost advantages unmanned systems offer over their manned counterparts, he said at a conference hosted by Aviation Week.
“We’ve got to be smarter about how we operate them,” he added.
A prominent Northrop Grumman UAV, the Block 30 version of Global Hawk is facing cancellation after the Air Force concluded it was too expensive for the required mission and removed it from its fiscal 2013 spending plan announced recently. The service said it will instead rely on legacy U-2 spy planes.
Dufresne said Northrop Grumman was “disappointed” with the decision and was seeking clarification from the Air Force about the decision and how best to go forward.