By Marina Malenic
ANDERSEN AFB, Guam–The Air Force yesterday officially unveiled the first RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned reconnaissance plane deployed to the Pacific region at a ceremony on Guam, noting that the U.S. island territory is an ideal home base for the long-endurance spy plane.
“If you look at the map of the Pacific, Guam is in the perfect location for this platform,” said Gen. Gary North, commander of Pacific Air Forces. “You can fly in any direction–north, south, east or west–and the Global Hawk can give us the capacity to execute humanitarian or military missions in this region.”
With a range of 10,000 miles, the Guam-based Global Hawk will provide surveillance from the Indian Ocean to the west coast of South America, Air Force officials here explained.
North said during a Global Hawk unveiling ceremony that the aircraft’s ability to collect imagery and send it to military decision makers in near real-time is invaluable.
“The intelligence and the download from this platform can be pumped to wherever our distributed ground stations are to do the processing, the exportation and then the dissemination of the intelligence and the information gathered,” he said.
The plane has a wide range of applications, including counter-terrorism and anti-piracy, he added.
And while Global Hawk is not weaponized, Air Force officials said its mere presence would have a stabilizing effect on the region.
“People tend to behave better when they know they’re being watched,” Lt. Gen. Herbert Carlisle, commander of 13th Air Force, told Defense Daily on the sidelines of the arrival ceremony on Guam. Carlisle is responsible for Air Force operations in the Pacific Command region.
Two more Global Hawks are scheduled to move to Guam some time this year, with another expected in 2011, said Carlisle. The Defense Department has built a new hangar here specifically for the drones.
In addition to the RQ-4 on Guam, a Global Hawk was stationed at Sigonella, Italy, on the island of Sicily this month.
The remotely piloted aircraft that can fly for 30 hours at a time was developed and built by Northrop Grumman [NOC]. Company officials have said they are studying ways to lower the price of the aircraft in the wake of Pentagon efforts to reduce overhead costs. A series of “affordability initiatives” are being presented to key Defense Department acquisition officials as they conduct a “should-cost” review of the program leading up to the department’s Fiscal 2012 budget submission early next year.
The Air Force currently has 10 Global Hawks in its fleet, at an average purchase price of $55 million apiece, according to budget documents.
The Global Hawk now stationed on Guam has flown more than 45,000 hours, of which more than 35,000 were for combat operations in the Central Command region, North told Defense Daily following the ceremony.
The RQ-4 has been used in a wide variety of contingency operations and humanitarian missions, said Lt. Col. Brandon Baker, Air Combat Command Detachment 3 commander. For example, the Global Hawk provided firefighters struggling to contain wildfires in California with a near real-time view of the crisis, helping them to direct their efforts.
Other imagery collected by Global Hawks around the world and exhibited at the ceremony showed disturbed earth in Iraq that could be a sign that roadside bombs had been implanted, as well as collapsed buildings and other destruction in Haiti following the massive earthquake there earlier this year.
The Air Force 9th Operations Group Detachment 3 at Andersen will launch and recover the aircraft, according to officials here, but the majority of missions will be controlled by pilots out of Beale AFB, Calif.
The Global Hawk can travel at altitudes up to 60,000 feet and can do long-endurance missions up to 32 hour flights. The drones are slated to eventually replace the Cold War-era U-2 spy plane.
The Guam-based aircraft arrived on the island Sept. 1 to undergo testing before beginning to conduct missions later this month, officials said.