PALMDALE, Calif.— Aircraft manufacturer Northrop Grumman [NOC] plans to equip the Air Force’s entire fleet of RQ-4C Global Hawk unmanned aircraft with advanced signals intelligence sensors, giving the autonomous plane the same capabilities as the venerable U-2 spy plane, according to company officials.
The SIGINT capability for the Global Hawk will be focused on the Block 30 variant of the aircraft, Bill Walker, Northrop Grumman’s campaign lead for Global Hawk advanced capabilities, said in a June 9 interview here.
Over the next year, program officials plan to deliver seven SIGINT-equipped Block 30 Global Hawks to the Air Force, according to Walker. “Of that seven, it will be a mix of retrofits and Block 30M deliveries,” he said.
The air service currently has nine Block 30 aircraft, three of which are under U.S. Central Command. The remaining six have been split between Andersen AFB, Guam and Naval Air Station in Sigonella, Italy. The CENTCOM aircraft arrived in theater last month, while the planes in Italy and Guam have been on station for the past year.
The Block 30M version, the Global Hawk with the signals intelligence capability already built into the airplane, will begin to replace the nine non-SIGINT Block 30s in Italy, Guam and at CENTCOM. The first two of those Block 30M models are currently undergoing flight testing at Northrop Grumman’s facility here, he said.
The current Block 30 configuration deployed in Italy, Guam and CENTCOM are equipped with electro-optic and infared sensors. But beginning this summer, company officials will begin getting deliveries of the Airborne Signals Intelligence Payloads (ASIP) and start building them into non-SIGINT Block 30 aircraft. That modification and upgrade work will carry on through the fall, according to Walker.
“What we are going to do is bring those back to retrofit, every couple of months, those existing airplanes” with SIGINT technology, according to Walker.
Those SIGINT-capable Block 30s–both retrofitted Global Hawks and Block 30Ms–are scheduled to roll off the production line by next July. Company officials hope to have a total of nine ASIP-upgraded Block 30s in the field by the end of 2012, Walker said.
The ASIP sensor package, also developed by Northrop Grumman, is already on board the Cold War-era U-2 intelligence, reconnaissance and surveillance aircraft. That addition of ASIP to the Air Force Global Hawk puts the program on track to begin replacing the U-2 in the service’s inventory over the next few years.
According to service plans, the Air Force expects to hit its six-orbit goal for Global Hawks sometime between 2014 and 2015, pending any budget reductions in those years, according to Walker. One orbit or Combat Air Patrol (CAP) includes four unmanned aircraft. So with six orbits, plus a handful of training and test aircraft, the air service anticipates having roughly 30 Global Hawk Block 30 planes in its fleet no later than 2015.
The plan to retrofit the Air Force Block 30 Global Hawks will put those planes on par, capability-wise, with the Navy variant of the unmanned aircraft.
Members of the Navy’s Persistent Maritime Unmanned Aircraft Systems program office (PMA-262) are exploring the integration of the Airborne Signals Intelligence Payload (ASIP) system currently on board the Air Force’s RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft into the Navy’s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS), UAS, program manager Capt. Bob Dishman told Defense Daily in April.
The capability development document for the initial increment of the Navy’s unmanned aerial system noted that future iterations of the aircraft would feature more robust communications relays and a signals intelligence capability.
“Realize that the initial increment of BAMS does…cover a certain amount of the frequency spectrum with electronic support measures,” Dishman said at the time. “What we do not have is the communications intelligence piece, so we would [have to] add that functionality to the airplane.”