SEAPOWER Magazine Online
Posted: August 18, 2016 9:34 AM
Navy Air Boss: Looking for ‘Sweet Spot’ in MQ-25 Unmanned Aircraft Design
By RICHARD R. BURGESS, Managing Editor
SILVER SPRING, Md. — The Navy is looking for the right balance of characteristics for its planned MQ-25A Stingray unmanned carrier-based aircraft for its missions and carrier handling, the Navy’s air boss said.
Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker, commander, Naval Air Forces, speaking Aug. 12 to an audience at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington think tank, said the defense industry responses to the Navy’s request for proposals for the MQ-25A have been received.
MQ-25 Unmanned Aircraft Poses Design Challenges for Navy, Industry - Blog
The Navy and its industry partners are faced with major design challenges as they seek to develop a dual-mission, carrier-launched drone, the commander of Naval Air Forces said Aug. 18.
The MQ-25 Stingray is expected to perform tanking missions as well as intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. The Navy sent out a request for proposals last month and responses from industry have been received, Vice Adm. Mike Shoemaker said at a conference hosted by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“As I talked to those industry partners, I realized … designs to do one or those other mission sets alone are different,” he said.
For the ISR mission, you ideally want a high-endurance platform with a large wingspan and “probably not a lot of fuel on board,” he noted.
But “if you’re going to be a tanker at range, you’ve got to obviously be able to carry a fair amount of fuel internal to the platform. So that drives a different design for those two” missions, he said.
The Defense Department has commissioned a tanker study to examine the problem.
“We’re kind of looking at where the trade space is,” Shoemaker said. “It’s really to get at the design of the two mission sets we think that airplane will do.”
GAO Report UCLASS Sees Progress CBARS | French Navy Seizes Somalia Bound Weapons Cache | 490 Participants, 47 Countries Attend Defexpo India 2016
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has published its annual report
on the the Navy’s Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike (UCLASS) program, as authorized by the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014. By analyzing the DOD budget for FY 2017 and speaking to program officials, the GAO found that the U.S. Navy has begun to develop modifications to existing shipboard systems to support the UCLASS’ latest iteration – Carrier Based Aerial Refueling System (CBARS). As with the UCLASS program, CBARS will include an air system segment, an aircraft carrier segment, and a control system and connectivity segment. WEST: NAVAIR’s Unmanned Aerial Tanker Acquisition Will Be Leaner Than Previous UCLASS Effort - USNI News
NAVAIR’s Vice Adm. Paul Grosklags said the pursuit of the RAQ-25 UAV – currently dubbed the Carrier Based Aerial Refueling System (CBARS) – would take the work from the UCLASS acquisition and streamline the process – one burdened with a high level of requirements churn to
industry.
“We end up giving to industry, giving to you all a specification — a statement of work — that literally contains thousands of shall statements. And every one of those shall statements is of equal
importance because if you don’t comply with it you’re not complying with the terms of the contract. Thousands of them,” Grosklags said at the WEST conference on Thursday.
“What we’re doing with RAQ-25 is we’ve taken those thousands of shall statements down to a couple of hundred. We’re streamlining the team. We’re taking the typical hundreds of NAVAIR folks that would be working on a program like that and bringing it down to dozens. That is the culture change that we’re trying to get to with inside NAVAIR.”
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