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Air Force team rigs Army UAV for remote ops

An Air Force team is rigging an Army RQ-7 Shadow unmanned aerial vehicle so it can be flown by operators who are thousands of miles from the aircraft itself, the same way the Air Force operates its Predator UAVs.

This is a departure for the Army, whose UAV pilots must be in the same location as the aircraft. By contrast, the Air Force flies its Predator UAVs over Iraq and Afghanistan from ground control stations in Nevada.

The Air Force will conduct of demonstration of the concept — called remote split operations — with the Shadow in the next few months, said Martha Evans, the Air Force’s top UAV acquisition official.

The ground control station for the demonstration will be at Fort Belvoir, Va., and the aircraft will be at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Calif., she said.

“They’ve loaned us one of their Shadows, we’re working with their contractor, and we’ve got the guys that originally designed the remote split ops for [the Air Force] to do it for them as well,” she said.

The Army’s tactical UAVs, such as Shadows, are battalion-level assets that rotate in and out of the war zones with the units that own them. But remote split operations would allow the Army, if it chose, to leave the Shadows in the war zone and fly them from the U.S., Evans said.

Remote split operations require the UAV to be able to link up with a satellite. About half of the MQ-1C Sky Warriors the Army buys will have that capability, Evans said. This raises the possibility that the Army could fly its Warriors — which are much larger and fly higher than Shadows — remotely rather than in theater.

The Shadow, manufactured by AAI Corp., has a wingspan of 14 feet, a ceiling of 19,000 feet, can carry a payload of up to 60 pounds and can stay aloft for five to seven hours, according to the manufacturer’s Web site. The MQ-1C Sky Warrior has a wingspan of 56 feet, a ceiling of 29,000 feet, can carry a payload of 1,275 pounds and can stay aloft for more than 30 hours, according to General Atomics, the manufacturer. The Warrior can also carry four Hellfire missiles.

The Army plans to buy 132 MQ-1Cs in it first batch. The Air Force plans to switch from the B to the C model beginning in 2009, but it will still call the aircraft the Predator.