New details about Lockheed’s latest stealth drone

Happy Friday. Killer Apps sat down with Rob Ruszkowski, Lockheed Martin’s man in charge of making sure its new stealth drone becomes the U.S. Navy’s next light-strike and reconnaissance jet.

Remember, the sea service is looking to field an unmanned, stealthy, fighter-size jet capable of taking off from aircraft carriers and doing everything from spying to bombing to conducting air-to-air refueling by 2020 under a program called Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike — or UCLASS. The Navy is about to give Lockheed — along with Boeing, General Atomics, and Northrop Grumman — contracts to develop prototypes.

Lockheed’s bid uses technology that the company developed for its newest stealth planes, such as the RQ-170 Sentinel drone and the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. This is meant to keep costs and development times down. Lockheed’s aim is to have a first flight by 2017 or 2018, a pretty aggressive schedule given the fact that it has taken decades to field the U.S. military’s most recent fighter jets: the F-35 and the F-22 Raptor.

"We’re reusing a lot of systems, and software and hardware and technology that we have from other places — F-35, RQ-170 — and we’re integrating those systems [onto a new airframe] not inventing them," Ruszkowski said. While the company doesn’t have an actual prototype yet, it does have a full-scale mock-up sitting in a California facility, according to Ruszkowski.

The new plane’s airframe borrows from the design of the RQ-170 and Lockheed’s older, experimental drones like the Polecat, he said. It will take sensors, software, and stealth coatings that are able withstand harsh sea air from the F-35.

The plane is designed to easily accept new hardware, such as sensors, electronic warfare gear, and new software that may not be available when the first jets enter service

"We’ve tailored our [design] to meet, not only what we saw as the evolving requirements to be, but to have the foundation to grow beyond that," said Ruszkowski. What’s this mean? "It could start its early operational career with a base model, and then you add to it later."

So, what kind of gear might the jet be equipped with to start? High-powered cameras and radars that will allow it to survey wide swaths of the sea and shore to identify targets from beyond the range of an enemy’s most potent defenses.

The jet will carry some sort of electro-optical/infrared (EO/IR) camera that’s capable of doing wide area searches and battle damage assessment, "where you want a very, very high-resolution image," said Ruszkowski. "A lot of the things this type of aircraft might be used to gather intelligence on, might be in situations where you need to be further away" from the target in order to stay away from antiaircraft defenses. (The camera will not be based on Lockheed’s Electro-Optical Targeting System, which is going on the F-35, he noted.)

The plane may also carry some sort of powerful surveillance radar — similar to this one — allowing it to identify targets moving along the sea or land and even to take snapshots through clouds using a technique called synthetic-aperture radar imaging.

While the jet will start its career as a spy plane that’s capable of dropping about 1,000 pounds worth of bombs on targets it finds, it could eventually be used as an electronic-warfare platform or as a flying gas station refueling other Navy jets.

"I think the first aircraft that will go to early operational capability may only have an EO/IR sensor. That’s up to the Navy. They might say, ‘Hey, we want to get this thing out there, fielded, doing some initial missions and maybe all it needs is an EO/IR sensor and the radar comes two or three years later,’" said Ruszkowksi.

Lockheed has yet to field a jet that can take off and land from an aircraft carrier with minimal human involvement — something that the Navy and Lockheed’s rival in the UCLASS effort, Northrop Grumman, are working to master right now with a program known as UCAS-D, which is meant to pave the way for UCLASS. Ruszkowski says he’s not too worried about this since Lockheed has conducted simulated landings on carriers in rough seas and that it will receive information from the Navy about what it learns from UCAS-D. Hopefully, they will get the Sea Ghost’s tail-hook design right. (We couldn’t write an article about Lockheed and aircraft carrier jets without mentioning it.)