The third member of the Predator family is the MQ-9 Reaper. This is a 4.7 ton, 11 meter/36 foot long aircraft with a 20 meter/66 foot wingspan that looks like the MQ-1. It has six hard points, and can carry about a ton (2,400 pounds) of weapons. These include Hellfire missiles (up to eight), two Sidewinder or two AMRAAM air-to-air missiles, two Maverick missiles, or two 227 kg/500 pound smart bombs (laser or GPS guided.) Max speed is 400 kilometers an hour, and max endurance is 15 hours. The Reaper is considered a combat aircraft, to replace F-16s or A-10s in ground support missions.
Once again our Air Force is showing its apparent distain for ground support. Replace the A-10 with this thing? The UAV doesn’t even have a gun!
In Viet Nam we loved the old A-1 Skyraider. It could hang around for hours and carried a good bomb load along with four 20 mm cannons. If the fast flyers were sent to help us they’d fly in, drop their load and fly back to rearm/refuel.
Our Air Force is in love with high and fast. Low and slow works much better for ground support. It also wants everything that flys under its control. Back in the early 60s all Army fixed wing aircraft were turned over to the Air Force. It’s the same with our Navy – now they want to take over all Army ships and boats.
Just returned from Langley-Eustis complex in Southern Virginia. This is just one of 6 joint bases now in the DOD. Langley AFB and Fort Eustis have been joined and the Air Force is the lead on this amalgamation. The future that I see is the bases coming together until we have one force I guess.
Not so. My father was an army aviator during that period, and flew both fixed and rotary wing (army doctrine at the time). He also commanded an aviation battalion in Vietnam, flying fixed wing aircraft, in around '68.
One bit of interest- I'm told that Dad was the first instrument qualified helicopter pilot in the army!