The Navy’s MQ-4 Triton, a variant of the Air Force’s RQ-4 Global Hawk, is scheduled to make its first flight in the “very near future” following the resolution of some technical problems that prompted the Navy to delay production earlier this year, a senior Northrop Grumman [NOC] executive recently said.
Tom Vice, the president of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, said the problems lied within the development of some mission management software and the V-shaped tail known as a “ruddervator.”
“We got through our labs and got through our development testing, we found some issues we had to address. We’ve addressed those,” he said, noting the Triton has completed high-speed taxi tests and is ready to go.
“We’re looking forward to our first flight in the very near future,” he told a handful of reporters at Northrop Grumman’s corporate headquarters in Falls Church, Va. Vice was not more specific on the flight schedule.
Northrop Grumman is building the Tritons at its Palmdale, Calif., facility. The MQ-4s were developed under the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance, or BAMS, program. The Navy plans to buy 68 of the land-based aircraft, hoping the high-flying, long-endurance Tritons will extend its ability to monitor the oceans.
In rolling out its budget proposal for fiscal 2014 in April, the Navy said it needed to delay the low-rate initial-production (LRIP) phase of the program until at least 2015 because of the technical problems, which pushed back the flight testing timeframe.
In the budget request, the Navy added $200 million to the research and development account for Triton in 2014 and subtracted about $425 million that would have gone toward production. The Navy now plans to spend $375 million on R&D in 2014 and $52 million on production, according to the budget documents.
The Navy has built or is in the process of building five Tritons with Northrop Grumman under the systems development and demonstration (SDD) phase. The BAMS program included the acquisition of five Global Hawks from the Air Force that became BAMS-Demonstrators.