Seeking to meet the needs of ever more budget conscious government customers, Northrop Grumman [NOC] last week introduced and began demonstrating a relatively low cost special mission aircraft that can do wide area surveillance and intelligence missions as well as basic transport for a variety of missions.
The Air Claw is an “affordable and highly capable” special mission aircraft that can perform border security, law enforcement, disaster response, event security and international security missions, Tom Kubit, the director of the program for Northrop Grumman’s Technical Services sector, told Defense Daily on Friday.
The aircraft is based on a Quest Aircraft Company KODIAK single-engine, short take-off and landing aircraft and includes in its baseline configuration a FLIR Systems‘ [FLIR] 380-HD electro-optic camera and a Persistent Surveillance Systems‘ Hawkeye wide area motion imaging sensor capable of watching a four-mile by four-mile area.
An operator can use the wide area sensor to zoom in on subject while it continues to monitor the larger area, Kubit said. The baseline package also includes tactical radios, two-way wideband datalink, two operator workstations, a spotter station, a tactical mobile ground station, and Northrop Grumman’s Chimera mission planning software.
The Air Claw can also be reconfigured by two people in four hours for passenger and or cargo transport, Kubit said.
In March, Northrop Grumman signed an exclusive teaming arrangement with Quest to sell the Kodiak into the federal market as well as the preferred special mission aircraft integrator (Defense Daily, March 20). The aircraft can also operate from austere runways.
Kubit said that the Air Claw with its baseline package is being offered for millions of dollars less than a Hawker Beechcraft King Air 350ER and in the neighborhood of Switzerland’s Pilatus PC-12 aircraft with no special mission equipment onboard.
Additional mission equipment that could be added to the Air Claw or swapped out with systems that make up the base package include tag tracking and location sensors, lightweight synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator, LIDAR optical remote sensing technology, and satellite communications, Kubit said.
Kubit noted that Northrop Grumman has been providing special mission aircraft to customers for over 21 years. The company has worked on up to 18 different airframes to deliver multiple special mission planes, he said.