As we all know, the US Navy
did not select the Mariner unmanned aircraft system - offered by Lockheed
Martin and General Atomics-Aeronautical Systems (GA-ASI) - for the Broad Area
Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) contract.
Indeed, Lockheed
has protested the USN's decision to select the Northrop Grumman RQ-4N Global
Hawk. That process is ongoing.
Meanwhile, I was offered an opportunity yesterday to interview Tom Cassidy, president and CEO of
GA-ASI, the maker-of-all-things-Predator.
Cassidy, a former navy fighter pilot, could not speak about his partner's protest claim on BAMS, but he did explain why the idea of a marinized Predator B is still very much alive - and perhaps still destined for a USN contract eventually.
Cassidy is not what
you might call a typically reticent defense contractor. For example, Cassidy recently opted to withdraw
the Predator B from a contract selection process by the Canadian military.
Why?
Mainly, it was because the
Canadians wanted to impose overly harsh penalties if aircraft are delivered late, he told me yesterday in an interview.
"I didn't
feel it was prudent to get into [such a deal] with a customer," he says. "I
think it would just lead to hard feelings."
There are apparently no such hard feelings by Cassidy about the BAMS decision. At the very least, if he believes his prime contractor partner Lockheed got a bad deal on the navy's selection, he's not saying.
More to the point, the BAMS loss certainly doesn't mean GA-ASI is giving up on the market for a navy version of the Predator."We're still marketing not the Mariner, but a marinized Predator B," Cassidy says.
The Mariner configuration, which mated the Predator B airframe to the Altair's high-altitude wing,is clearly not GA-ASI's only option.
Simply unscrew the Predator B's synthetic aperture radar and plug in a maritime radar in the bottom of the fuselage, and you've got an armed, unmanned and long-endurance aircraft for the navy, he says.
The marinized Predator B may appeal to some elements in the US Air Force, Cassidy says, as well as to civilian government agencies. "We just did a demonstration in the Caribbean last month with the (Department of) Homeland Security."
Maybe's it's Cassidy's navy roots talking, but he's not giving up on the idea of the USN eventually buying swarms of Predator Bs:"Oh, absolutely," he says. "I hope so."
Comments (2)
Good article Stephen. And yeah the B does carry a lot. I could never see this as an either-or. I think the Global Hawk Platform is very important for this. But yet I think the B Predator is too. I think they would overlap well for each other for these missions. And in the long run, save money (horses for courses).
It is my opinion that there is too much over-thinking. You would never see the USAF for example have Predators OR Global Hawk. So maritime surveillance deals with things that float. Big deal.
I think USN will need both kinds of UAVs. I think the PowerPoint Excel spreadsheet leaders may change their tune over this. USAF threatened to look at having more U-2s somehow build/bought when Global Hawk got to pricey and still while Global Hawk is awesome, it still isn't upgraded to where it can do all of the U-2 mission sets yet for tactical environs.
Posted by ELP | May 21, 2008 2:30 AM
Posted on May 21, 2008 02:30
I completely agree. Acquisition rules prevent the USN from buying two different aircraft in the same program, but what they really need is a mixed fleet for this mission. You can already feel the pressure to fill the vacuum of capability caused by the BAMS selection.
It would be interesting if the Boeing/Gulfstream G550 -- or perhaps the new G650 -- becomes part of the solution for EPX.
That would mean the USN could still potentially purchase every platform that competed for the original BAMS award.
It's like the special olympics: everyone wins!
Posted by Stephen Trimble
|
May 21, 2008 2:08 PM
Posted on May 21, 2008 14:08