The Aircraft Addresses An Ever-Increasing Demand For Greater Range, Altitude, Endurance And Payload Flexibility

Despite defense budget constraints, the Army's Unmanned Aircraft Systems are growing, especially the Gray Eagle program. "And with the budget movements afoot for the 2012 fiscal year, we will accelerate the Gray Eagle from two companies per year to three companies per year," said Tim Owens, deputy project manager for Unmanned Aircraft Systems.

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Owens was among Army leaders speaking at the Association of the U.S. Army Aviation Symposium and Exposition which brought more than 500 military, government and industry professionals to discuss how to best sustain and acquire the required materiel to directly support the aviation warfighter and combatant commander during combat operations.

Although the theme for the Jan. 12 to 14 event at the Gaylord National Hotel and Convention Center was "Full Spectrum Aviation: Resilient and Adaptive for the Future Security Environment," the Unmanned Aircraft System garnered much interest with its ability to save lives on missions that are often referred to as too dull, dirty or dangerous for manned aircraft.

"We also expect to be funded to fill our needs for both video and wide-area surveillance capability," Owens said of the UAS program, adding that the Army will be asking for procurement of five additional attrition aircraft in February.

The Gray Eagle, one of the largest programs managed by UAS, will provide combatant commanders a much-improved real-time responsive capability to conduct long-swell, wide-area reconnaissance, surveillance, target acquisition, communications relay, and attack missions, Owens said.

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The Gray Eagle addresses an ever-increasing demand for greater range, altitude, endurance and payload flexibility. At 3,200 pounds, this UAS has improved take-off and landing performance, coupled with the flexibility to operate with or without satellite communications data links. These are just some of the characteristics that make this system a combat multiplier. "Gray Eagle is really the ultimate enabler for what we're trying to do," said Owens. "With the Shadow class of systems at brigade and the smaller class at battalion and below, you need to have a way to cue those systems to the targets, which we do with a variety of intel feeds," Owens said. "But the Gray Eagle will allow us to carry wide-area surveillance sensors, a wider array of payloads, and become a top-level cueing platform for us. It also becomes the network enabler in order for us to increase dissemination, not just from Gray Eagle, but from our other stuff because you can pass the information through Gray Eagle to the ground and things of that nature. So from that perspective, it is super important."

Lt. Col. Jennifer Jensen, product manager for Common Systems Integrations, Unmanned Aircraft Systems, said a demonstration of these capabilities will occur at Dugway Proving Ground, Utah, later this year. "The Army has always been seen as a leader in making our systems as interoperable as possible. So, we're going to leverage off the one system remote video terminal that we started fielding in 2007 and expand that capability to the manned aircraft, because we put that technology into the Apache and the OH-58 and also the command and control Black Hawk," Jensen said.

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