Flight technician Darryl Bech inspects the landing gear of the Global Hawk plane in a hangar at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif., Wednesday, April 18, 2001. The robotic aircraft landed in Australia April 23, 2001, where it will take part in combined military exercises. ADELAIDE, Australia -- An unmanned U.S. spy plane that lurks in the skies at 63,000-feet landed flawlessly Monday night at a South Australian military base after crossing the Pacific Ocean from California.
Global Hawk, a U.S. $20 million, jet-engine powered aircraft with a bulbous nose, V-shaped tail and wingspan equivalent to a Boeing 737, is intended mostly for high-altitude radar, visual and infrared surveillance.
While it's not packed with the kind of high-capacity communications listening gear as the U.S. EP-3 reconnaissance plane, it does illustrate the potential for such unmanned surveillance planes in the future. One advantage is that such unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be ditched in the sea in a crisis than have to put down unexpectedly in foreign lands and be rifled by prickly locals.
It also flies nearly twice as high as commercial jets, and almost four times as high as the ill-fated US Navy EP-3 reconnaissance plane that collided with a Chinese fighter jet April 1. That mid-air kerfuffle quickly led to a diplomatic test of wills between the U.S. and China that has yet to be fully resolved.
While the U.S. plans to introduce Global Hawk aircraft to U.S. military reconnaissance duties sometime after 2005, the Global Hawk aircraft now in Australia is being largely tested for use in coastal surveillance -- a task Australia has like nobody else.
With a 20,000-mile-long coastline, Australia's Air Force and Navy have their hands full patrolling the vast seas around this U.S.-sized continent for illegal fisherman, immigrants and smugglers.
On Monday night, U.S. and Australian military officials were busy patting themselves on the back for how smoothly the trans-Pacific flight went.
"It really only given three commands during the entire 23-and-a-half hour flight," Australian Air Force Commander Graham Bentley told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). "The first was to taxi, the second was to take off, and the third came when air traffic control contacted us and asked us to make an orbit (i.e. fly around) just before landing."
Australian Air Force squadron leader Jeff Frost, who in the past has commanded lengthy reconnaissance flights over Australian waters, was among those monitoring the Global Hawk flight from inside a series of portable, instrumentation-filled shipping containers in Adelaide.
"The stress of flying is immense, particularly when you're flying 10 to 11 hours with all the noise and vibration," he told the ABC. "The fact that you can now direct things remotely, as much as 3,000 kilometers from the plane, is pretty mind-boggling to me."
Using optical, radar and infrared sensors, the aircraft can "see" through all types of weather, day or night, and survey in detail an area the size of Virginia every 24 hours.
Among other things, Globalhawk's optical cameras can pick out an object the size of a life raft in the ocean from 61,000 feet up -- and its radar can track vessels moving anywhere from zero to 21 knots. It can also fly at a speed of about 375 miles per hour for roughly 32 hours or roughly 12,000 miles without refueling.
The plane communicates with controllers through dedicated remote radio channels and satellite communications.
"There is no precedent for this level of performance in the U.S. or Europe and off-the-shelf commercial systems," said Jane Babbidge, spokesman for Australia's Defense Science and Technology Organization.
