Northrop Grumman [NOC] has proposed a plan to the Air Force for upgrading the imagery resolution capability on the Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles by using powerful cameras currently deployed on U-2 spy planes, a top executive said yesterday.
Tom Vice, the president of Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems, said using the Senior Year Electro-optical Reconnaissance Systems-2B (SYERS-2B) cameras would be an affordable solution to an Air Force request to improve the range resolution, largely because the service already has them in its inventory.
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| Global Hawk. Photo by Northrop Grumman. |
Vice said the company could integrate the SYERS hardware on the Block 30 Global Hawks using a universal payload adapter at a cost of less than $50 million dollars for six airplanes. He said that cost would come in at about 6 percent of an Air Force estimate to purchase new hardware and integrate it on the Global Hawks.
The Block 30 Global Hawk is meeting its defined requirements under the current configuration, but Vice said there have been scenarios where a higher resolution has been needed.
“This is about those specific needs where a greater range of resolution is required, and that is what we’re addressing,” Vice told a small group of reporters at Northrop Grumman’s corporate headquarters in Falls Church, Va.
Northrop Grumman is offering to perform the work under a firm fixed price contract, meaning the Air Force would be absolved of having to cover any possible cost overruns, Vice said. Installing the relatively larger SYERS on the Global Hawks would require having to remove two of the three main sensors currently fielded on the Block 30s.
The Pentagon last year proposed terminating the Block 30 version of the aircraft, citing the high costs. Congress, however, restored the funding in the fiscal 2013 budget despite the Air Force’s desire to kill the program.
Northrop Grumman had been continuously looking to reduce the overall cost of operating Global Hawk, but the debate over the fate of the program “raised the tempo” to get costs down, Vice said.
In a separate proposal, Vice said that Northrop Grumman has presented the Air Force with a five-year plan for contractor logistics and support services. He said the proposal would also include firm fixed price terms and would reduce the cost by an additional 20 percent compared to current levels.
“All risk is on us,” Vice said. “We are guaranteeing that cost as a firm fixed price contract type.”
The Air Force currently has 16 Block 30 Global Hawks with two under construction. There are an additional three planned, but they are not under contract. Northrop Grumman has submitted a proposal to build those aircraft but has yet to enter into negotiations with the Air Force, Vice said.