Video of the week: Boeing’s flying tadpole takes off

  Boeing’s giant flying tadpole has taken to the skies once again. That’s right, Boeing’s Phantom Eye UAV took its second flight yesterday for a 66-minute test flight out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The hydrogen-fueled drone climbed to 8,000 feet above the Mojave Desert and reached a top speed of 71 miles ...

 

 

Boeing’s giant flying tadpole has taken to the skies once again. That’s right, Boeing’s Phantom Eye UAV took its second flight yesterday for a 66-minute test flight out of Edwards Air Force Base in California. The hydrogen-fueled drone climbed to 8,000 feet above the Mojave Desert and reached a top speed of 71 miles per hour, according to a Boeing press release.

So you may be saying to yourself, "71 mph, no stealth; what’s the big deal?" Well, Phantom Eye is one of a relatively new crop of concept UAVs designed to operate at very high altitudes and stay there for a long time — four days, carrying a 450-pound payload at 65,000 feet in Phantom Eye’s case.

The so-called High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) aircraft are meant to loiter in airspace not used by other planes, watching targets on the ground, scanning swaths of air or land, or passing data and messages over long distances or mountain ranges that would normally interrupt communications. It has even been suggested that fleets of HALE drones could serve as an atmospheric back-up of U.S. satellites and ground-based communications gear if those were ever destroyed. 

John Reed is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He comes to FP after editing Military.com’s publication Defense Tech and working as the associate editor of DoDBuzz. Between 2007 and 2010, he covered major trends in military aviation and the defense industry around the world for Defense News and Inside the Air Force. Before moving to Washington in August 2007, Reed worked in corporate sales and business development for a Swedish IT firm, The Meltwater Group in Mountain View CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter at the Tracy Press and the Scotts Valley Press-Banner newspapers in California. His first story as a professional reporter involved chasing escaped emus around California’s central valley with Mexican cowboys armed with lassos and local police armed with shotguns. Luckily for the giant birds, the cowboys caught them first and the emus were ok. A New England native, Reed graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a dual degree in international affairs and history.

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