The future of military aviation is unmanned

PARIS — On the edge of the airfield at Le Bourget, a Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornet jet fighter looms with imposing menace. In front of it sits a dinky Boeing ScanEagle — just 4 feet long with a 10-foot wingspan — with model-airplane looks, a little rotor turned by a two-stroke engine, and a flimsy plastic airframe.

It's the little unmanned surveillance craft, not the high-performance fighter, that is part of the new wave in military aviation at this year's Paris Air Show.

The ScanEagle — designed and built by Boeing-owned Insitu, of the Columbia River Gorge town of Bingen, Klickitat County — has been battle-tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, and played a key role in the April rescue of U.S. containership captain Richard Phillips from Somali pirates.

A little Sony camera fitted in the nose can swivel and stream video images to an operator station, giving the military a mobile, close-in eye in the sky that's virtually undetectable from the ground.

"The Super Hornet is a beautiful machine," said Alejandro Pita, Insitu's director of business development, gesturing to the big jet behind him. "But honestly, after the JSF (Lockheed Martin's joint strike fighter jet), I don't know if the next fighter will be manned."

Each afternoon this week, an unmanned helicopter has hovered during the Air Show flying display.

And all around the airfield, at almost every stand, dozens of other unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of every variety are on view.

"Go through the show. Everyone has a UAV," Pita said.

Some are sleekly shaped like manta rays or whales. Others resemble some early Wright Brothers experiment.

That's because this rapidly proliferating field was born not in the labs of the big defense contractors, but in small shops run by teams of starry-eyed inventors.

Now the defense giants want in on the action. Boeing announced at the Air Show a new Seattle-based unmanned systems division, with current revenues at about a half-billion dollars and growing at a pace to hit $1 billion within three years.

All the big guys want to tap into the sector's entrepreneurial drive for innovation because, at least in the military, the future of aerospace looks unmanned.

"This is like the times of early aviation that brought us, in 100 years, to Boeing and Airbus and these airplanes you see all around you," Pita said. "We are following a similar type of pattern, but obviously at warp speed."

Boeing has come late to the UAV market.

In 2004 it acquired Irving, Calif.-based Frontier Systems, a small company with an unmanned surveillance, cargo and strike helicopter, the Hummingbird. Last fall, it acquired Insitu.

At an Air Show briefing on the new unmanned systems division, Boeing Vice President Chris Chadwick said the acquisitions allowed Boeing to enter the marketplace quickly. Part of the appeal of UAVs for both the military and the defense companies is that they are relatively cheap compared to regular manned military hardware, both to buy and to develop.

'Tens of people'

"We were able to build this with tens of people, rather than thousands," Chadwick said. Yet Boeing brings something of its own to the table.

Not only has it provided Insitu the customer contacts and knowledge that have grown its business, it has also begun to integrate the ScanEagle technology with its own vast array of military products.

In April, Boeing flew one of its Wedgetail 737 Airborne Early Warning and Control aircraft over Washington state and used it to control three ScanEagles at once from an operator station inside the plane.

Boeing had integrated the Insitu software with its own network, raising the prospect of feeding the video data to anywhere in the military command system.

And Boeing hopes a future UAV star may be an aircraft from within its Phantom Works research division, the X-45 unmanned combat vehicle that lost out in a Navy competition to Northrop Grumman in 2006.

Rather than being shelved, the X-45 has been renamed Phantom Ray and will be used as a prototype for a large unmanned combat machine, Boeing announced last month. It's essentially the company's shot at developing an unmanned aircraft that might replace that Super Hornet fighter jet.

Catching up

But Boeing has some catching up to do.

Northrop is widely seen as a leader in the field of unmanned systems. It followed a similar path to Boeing, though earlier, when in 1999 it acquired San Diego-based Ryan Aeronautical, maker of the Global Hawk surveillance aircraft.

Today, Northrop makes unmanned vehicles of all sorts, including undersea and ocean surface vehicles for the Navy and robots used by ground forces.

Gene Fraser, Northrop's vice president of Strike and Surveillance Systems, said in an interview in Paris that the company is completing sea trials with the Navy for its unmanned Fire Scout helicopter.

Replacing the Predator

Fraser said the next big defense procurement competition will be to replace the Predator, the now-famous unmanned missile-launching strike vehicle, built by San Diego, Calif.-based General Atomics, that is making headlines almost daily with missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Bidders for that contract are expected to include Northrop, General Atomics, Lockheed and Boeing.

Dominic Gates: 206-464-2963 or dgates@seattletimes.com