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AUVSI: USAF outlines evolving procedures for Global Hawk
Lessons learned from ongoing tactical applications are leading to an evolution in advanced operational procedures for the United States Air Force (USAF) RQ-4 Global Hawk.
The ongoing evolution was highlighted in general session comments presented to AUVSI’s Unmanned Systems North America by Brig Gen H D “Jake” Polumbo, Director of Plans and Programs at Headquarters, USAF Air Combat Command.
According to Polumbo, 'it takes a lot of coordination to get a Global Hawk from the 9th Reconnaissance Wing [Beale Air Force Base, California] to the 380th Air Expeditionary Wing primary base.'
'That is no easy feat to move that 10,000 miles plus, get it on the ground, get some fuel in it, and get it airborne into the AOR [area of responsibility]. So, how do we do that? And are those procedures going to evolve or are they going to stay the same way that we are doing them now? The answer is, of course they are not going to stay the same. And we have already worked our ‘polar routes’ and our more northern routes to really cut that time.'
We may, in fact, have been able to prove that we can regularly ‘sortie once’ to get these platforms back and forth from Beale Air Force Base in California over into the AOR. And that’s a big ‘thumbs up,' he added. 'Two sorties always increase the tendency for problems, as we worked our way through Pax River and then over into the AOR. One sortie greatly reduces the number of problems we have with our next airplane in theater. So we’ve got to figure that out.'
'But where is the limitation for these type of global operations if we don’t think about large bulky ground stations?' he offered. 'And that’s where we have looked in the Air Force at how to do these advanced launch and recovery procedures [with] very mobile, light, lean logistics teams that can either just put gas in it – put the new load in it – and then send it back airborne again; or actually some small maintenance work on it – change the tires or whatever it needs – to get these RPAs that can go anywhere on the globe to be able to be landed safely, moved back into the takeoff position, and taken off safely. You’ve got to be able to do that, but it is a ‘beyond line of sight launch mindset,’ not the ‘line of sight launch capability’ that we have really relied on over the last 10 years of UAVs. You’ve got to say, ‘How do we get a cell phone and a hook-up back to these mission control elements in these ops centers…and get that airplane airborne without having to have a bulky ground control segment or ground control station at that landing point.'
'We know that’s important,' he continued. 'And we are going to do it in a ‘joint’ [service] way and, as our international partners will understand, we are also going to do it in a ‘combined’ way, because they will allow us to do that when they open their airfields to us.'
'I was asked the other day about ‘divert options’ that the Global Hawk has when it is out doing its transit mission, and whether or not we need more capability to figure out how to get permission to land,' he said. 'And I told my boss, ‘Sir, quite honestly, if the Global Hawk is not told there is a runway underneath it, it does not know that there is a divert option. It just keeps pressing on. So until you tell these semi-autonomous UAVs that there is a divert option available underneath it, there’s not one, and it won’t land if it has a problem. So we have to look at that and we have to make sure these advanced procedures are something that are going to be useful for us in 2020 and beyond.'
By Scott Gourley, Denver
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