A new ground control station for the Air Force’s fleet of MQ-1 Predators and MQ-9 Reapers will be ready for deployment by 2013, a senior service official said.
The system, known as the “MQ1/9 Ground Control Station Block 50” will go into service to support the latest variants of the Predator and Reaper, Col. James Gear, director of the Air Force’s Remotely-Piloted Aircraft Task Force, said during an Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International symposium in Washington.
The control system itself will be created using an open architecture approach, which will allow service officials to modify or upgrade the system’s capabilities quickly, based on warfighter demands, according to Gear.
Aside from the adaptability that the open architecture approach will bring to the program, it will also open up “a market for third-party applications” to take part in the effort, he said.
To that end, several defense firms are working separate elements of the system’s initial capabilites suite.
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI), Raytheon [RTN], Northop Grumman [NOC] and AAI [TXT] are all collaborating on the ground system. Once complete, the ground control station will provide blue force tracking capabilities, as well as real-time combat weather data and an ability to catalogue full-motion video data for RPA operators, Gear said.
While the Air Force is moving ahead with improvements on its ground control stations, service officials are still grappling with capability issues on board the aircraft.
As demand for RPA assets continues to surge among service and DoD leaders, Gear said that gaining the bandwith to ensure those unmanned systems can meet that demand has been a challenge.
According to RPA chief, the air service is slated to hit one million combat flight hours by March of this year. If that current operational tempo is maintained, Air Force-led RPA ops will hit two million hours in the next two years.
One solution, Gear said, would be to explore options to automate data processing on board the aircraft, rather than stream the data down to service personnel on the ground and have it processed there.
While that technique would go a long way toward freeing up the amount of bandwith needed for RPA operations, getting such a system on board an unmanned aircraft means compromises will have to be made, in terms of weight and payload.
“We are going to have to make some hard choices,” he said.