Meet Triton, the Navy’s New Spy Drone

Though at first glance it looks a lot like the Air Force?s high-flying spy drone, the Navy?s new surveillance aircraft doesn?t want to be confused with the Global Hawk.

Northrop Grumman today unveiled its MQ-4C Triton, an unmanned aircraft the company has built for the Navy?s Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) program. The new unmanned aircraft, based on Northrop?s Global Hawk, will soon help patrol the oceans along with Navy aircraft such as the P-3 by providing overhead surveillance. "It?s been made more robust," Walt Kreitler, Northrop?s director of business development for BAMS, says of the new Triton aircraft.

The MQ-4C maintains many basic elements of the Global Hawk design, along with airframe improvements including anti-icing capabilities, improved anti-lightning protection, and a new wing design. The Triton is designed to be vertically agile?meaning, for example, that it could descend quickly through clouds to take a picture of a ship. It?s bigger than the Global Hawk, with a wingspan of 130 feet. The Triton will be based at five locations around the world and will have a range of 8000 nautical miles.

Beyond the changes to the airframe, the MQ-4C also carries different equipment to optimize it for maritime surveillance. The Triton will be equipped with a Multi-Function Active Sensor (MFAS) designed specifically for spotting objects in the ocean. This "field of regard" radar will provide 360-degree coverage of the area below, allowing it to spot ships and other objects of interest. The Triton will also fly a "due regard" radar that will help provide sense-and-avoid capabilities, a critical component for allowing unmanned aircraft to fly in the national airspace alongside manned aircraft.

Once the aircraft are delivered to the Navy it will begin flight testing, first at Edwards Air Force Base in California, and then at Patuxent River in Maryland. Currently the Triton?s 360-degree radar is being flown on a Gulf Stream aircraft, which Kreitler says has been a big success. The next step will be integrating it on the unmanned airframe. The Navy is scheduled to begin operating the Triton in 2015, with full capability fielded about five years after that.

Although Triton is based upon the RQ-4 Global Hawk, Northrop and the Navy have plenty of reason to emphasize the differences between the two. The Air Force?s Global Hawk platform has suffered a couple of hits to its reputation over the past year. First, the Global Hawk Block 30 aircraft, which was supposed to replace the manned U-2 spy aircraft, is on the chopping block because of escalating costs. The Pentagon wants to cancel the program and currently plans to keep the U-2s flying instead. Then there was the ill-timed crash earlier this week, when a Navy Global Hawk that was flying over Maryland went down. The cause of the crash still isn?t known, but Northrop is making a special effort to emphasize that the doomed aircraft, though part of the BAMS program, was not a MQ-4C Triton but rather a Global Hawk airframe that the Navy had adapted.

With every Pentagon weapon under scrutiny, one of the keys to keeping the Triton on track will be ensuring that it doesn?t suffer from the cost growth that plagued the Global Hawk. Kreitler remains confident that the Triton, which should save money on crew costs and transit time, will remain cost-effective. "Pound for pound, dollar for dollar for fuel, hour for hour of crew time, you get much more surveillance product [compared to manned aircraft]," he says.

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