Defence

General Atomics says its Predator UAV family type achieved more than 10,000 flight hours during April this year, up 2,000h on a previous standing monthly fleet average of 8,000 flight hours.

The US Air Force in the Middle East theatre operates the bulk of air vehicles contributing to the hours tally. The increase represents continued growth in the size of the USAF fleet through new deliveries as well as stepped-up operational tempo for deployed systems.

The April result equates to 13 Predator vehicles in the air every hour of every day says Steve May, GA-ASI’s European marketing manager. “If you think about it 8,000h a month, that is 11 Predators in the sky somewhere 24h a day. For 10,000h, make it 13 Predators. We are getting an awful lot of operational experience and our aircraft are logging and awful lot of hours”.

There are four individual MQ-1 Predator A aircraft currently nearing 5,000h each, May told the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International’s Unmanned Systems Europe conference in Cologne, Germany. Those aircraft “have been flying since the early 1990s”.

However, the highest number of hours achieved by any individual General Atomics airframe remains a US Army-operated I-GNAT ER aircraft that broke 5,000 flight hours in mid-2006. That UAV was deployed into Iraq in March 2004 and remains in service.

Total flight hours for all types of General Atomics UAVs have exceeded 280,000, up from a total of 50,000h achieved between 1990 and 2003.