Aircraft

Pilotless F-35 breaks cover

By Graham Warwick

Lockheed Martin has taken the wraps off studies of unmanned derivatives of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) as it mounts a concerted campaign to establish itself in the unmanned systems market. Concepts studied by Lockheed's Skunk Works include both optionally piloted and dedicated unmanned versions of the JSF.

"Two to three years ago we started looking at what could be done with the F-35," says Frank Mauro, deputy director unmanned aeronautical systems. The Skunk Works has taken both the optionally piloted and dedicated unmanned JSFs through concept design, he says, and is waiting until all three manned variants have flown before pursuing the idea.

"We have put it on the side until the F-35 flies," says Mauro. "For now the customers' focus is on getting the three variants flying. We will bring it back out when we get enough customer interest." A JSF derivative could be a follow-on to the recently terminated Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) programme, he says.

It would be relatively easy to operate the F-35 unmanned, "as there is enough intelligence in the systems", says Mauro, but simply removing the cockpit "would not change the cost much". A fuel tank could replace the coc­kpit, extending range, but the cost of the propulsion, avionics and sensor systems "do not change from manned to unmanned", he says.

To reduce cost, Lockheed has developed a concept of operations in which four unmanned JSFs would be controlled by two manned F-35s, or F-22s, sharing sensor information via an airborne datalink. This would allow the sensors to be removed from the unmanned F-35s, which would be used as weapon carriers, reducing cost to about 72% that of the manned aircraft - "30-35% of the cost is in the sensors", Mauro says.

Lockheed proposed a similar concept based on the F-16 in the early stages of the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) unmanned combat air vehicle (UCAV) technology demonstration programme that led to J-UCAS, but DARPA preferred a clean-sheet approach and awarded contracts to Boeing for the X-45 and Northrop Grumman for the X-47.

Boeing built and flew the X-45A UCAV demonstrator for DARPA, but the J-UCAS programme was terminated earlier this year before the X-45C and X-47B had flown.