Posted on 12/04/2009 3:46:26 PM PST by Reaganesque
The existence of a new secret plane photographed this week has been confirmed by the United States Air Force. The secret aircraft now has an official denomination: The RQ-170 Sentinel, a flying wing developed by Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works.
The RQ-170 is a stealthy unmanned aircraft designed to "provide reconnaissance and surveillance support to forward deployed combat forces." It's flown by the 30th Reconnaissance Squadron at Tonopah Test Range, Nevada, under the Air Combat Command's 432d Wing at Creech Air Force Base, Nevada.
The aircraft has a 65-foot wingspan, with a fat body and a blended wing design. It's unarmed, and—according to David A. Fulghum at Ares—its light color is unusual for high altitude UAV. [Ares]
Good point.
That concept started with Northrup back in the 40s. Impressive design, for sure.
“Skunk Works” refers back to the old ‘Lil Abner comic Strip by Al Capp. IIRC the Skunk Works was were the fdolks in the strip cooked up all sorts of crazy things.
Kelly Johnson who was Lockheed Aircrafts premeir desingner back in the 1950s and 60s borrowed the tag line for the secret priject shop at Lockheed. The U-2 and Sr-71 are two ofo the best examples of projects out of the Skunk Works
Regards
alfa6 ;>}
Interesting point. As far as I know, the Taliban’s air defense screen consists of a couple of guys with binoculars on the top of a hill somewhere. I suppose a small shape would be easier for these guys to miss, especially if you paint the body with light, sky colors. Perhaps that’s what they’re talking about when they say stealth here.
Unusually fat wing chord, hmmm. The engine nozzle is the same half moon shape as the Lockheed P175 Pole Cat, but the wing is not cranked on its trailing edge like the Pole Cat is.
The large central fuselage fairing likely houses a large sat communications and sensor mix. The 2 large blisters on the central fairing are likely intakes for a single turbofan engine.
The large doors inboard of the main landing gear may be bomb bay doors, although the RQ designator is for unarmed UAV's. Flying out of Kandahar indicates a short range, long hover ability, likely high altitude.
We've needed a stealth UAV to stay off the Paki radar.
They need to make these UAV’s all capable of automated air-2-air refuel, and as a stretch goal, air-2-air RE-ARM.
Perhaps they could have mother/drone mating, and some ordinance box could be hot-swapped —it could be slid through a conformal panel on the top side, or something.
In fact there have been examples of mother/daughter parasitic aircraft from WW2, both for the Luftwaffe and Imperial Japan.
The US also had 3 or so huge zeppelins (one was the USS Macon); bi-wing aircraft fitted with trestles could be recovered under the zeppelin, and then they were retracted inside the craft for servicing, pilot recovery, etc.
I’m thinking you would adapt something like a B-2 as a gas-can. I guess the air-2-air re-arm might take 20 years —it WILL be done, however.
Ingress and egress should happen just one time, with platforms staying on station for much longer, or loitering nearby. The whole concept of ingressing for hours and hours, then engaging in intense, brief combat, and then egressing for hours over thousands of miles will become an extinct idea —they’ll ingress, beat the hell out of the target, egress to some stealthy orbit nearby (or not so nearby), get re-fueled and re-armed (and even serviced for liquids, etc), and then go back for more fighting. And they’ll do that 10 20 more times, all before again touching wheels to ground. Five or ten or more crews shifts might hand-off care of such a platform.
They might have different crew classes —those that specialize in platform baby-sitting, and a smaller number of higher-performing, risk-crews who take over control of the platforms for the combat portions of missions. Eventually the baby-sitting portions will also be automated, requiring no-one to tend to them.
The number of personnel forward deployed to bases to care for such aircraft will be low compared to what we need now.
The protection of such bases will also be performed by small UAV’s and wheeled combat robots, with humans called only for dire emergencies.
This would be the basic idea. The mothership would not have to be this huge, and it WOULD have to be stealthy. Humans —or maybe just 1 specialist— might have to be aboard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjrI2ZvH_uE&feature=related
The attack aircraft would be refueled, re-armed, and maybe liquids would be replenished. And then it would return for more fighting.
The airforce would be very efficient, and would stay closer to action, perhaps over a nearby sea or ocean, or in some protected airspace. For counter-insurgency coverage, this could simply be high in the sky.
For a harder target, platform protection would become paramount, of course, as the mothership would make a great target.
From Afghanistan, we have Iran to the west, Pakistan to the east, and China to the northeast — all places with radar plus things we might want to keep an eye on.
Stealth reconnoitering of Iranian Nuclear sites.
Old man Northrop would be so proud.
ARC~LIGHT~~~ARC~BRITE~!!!
true....logistics....logistics....logistics....& more logistics. 
won't the ChiComs suffer as well, Are their systems as well developed?
bttt
What can be seen can be killed.
The Aurora isn’t a UAV. This is.
I tend to agree with your supposition about low tech to a small degree, after air superiority has been achieved.
Problem is, it takes the high tech stuff to gain air superiority and I would not want our soldiers to go without. After that, having some low tech options would actually cost us more as there would be still more different platforms with crews.
Having support staff is not new. Consider that every WWII war plane had it’s own maintenance crew and you soon find not much has changed.
There has been a rumor for sometime that it was built to compliment the F-22. I have even heard that it can be “flown†from the F-22. Does not make a lot of sense but possibly to go ahead and confuse enemy radar with false signals and jamming.
Not if all the enemy has is small arms. More to the point, if your aircraft are to be used to attack the enemy, if it is a drone, the only thing of importance is that the enemy fire is ineffective; if it is not for that purpose, then just being able to avoid enemy fires is enough.
While the USAF has consistently prepared for a fight with a technologically advanced military since the end of WWII, the truth is that unless our enemy is sponsored by a technologically capable power, such as in Vietnam, everyone we have conflicted with are low technology, usually in unconventional warfare.
For this we need high endurance, low maintenance, and low cost aircraft.
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