Global Hawk returns to flight Published Sept. 24, 2009 By Diane Betzler Aerotech News and review EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Calif. -- The Global Hawk returned to the skies high above Edwards Air Force Base and Air Force officials say the high-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aircraft is now better than ever. Only three months after experiencing a mishap that should have cost the 452nd Flight Test Squadron the loss of its star airplane, the Global Hawk made a highly successful return to flight Sept. 9. The aircraft experienced a flight control malfunction during a routine flight test mission last May that by all accounts rendered it incapable of landing. Lt. Col. Nathan Smith, commander of the 452nd FLTS and director of the Global Vigilance Combined Test Force said if not for the heroic efforts on the test team, the Global Hawk would have been lost. "The Combined Test Force team along with personnel from Northrop Grumman's San Diego facility and the 303rd Aeronautical Systems Group at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio figured out a way to land an aircraft that could not land," he said. Lt Col. Smith said the technical orders that govern how we fly the airplane were silent for the particular malfunction the aircraft was experiencing. He said, in fact, the test team briefed the center leadership about a year ago that if the aircraft experienced this malfunction it was not recoverable. Lt Col. Clifton Janney, director of operations for the 452nd, agreed that according to all their training, the appropriate course of action was to crash the aircraft. "But the test team said crashing the aircraft was not an option and figured out a way to land the multi million dollar aircraft saving it and its very expensive integrated sensor system," Colonel Smith said. Lt Col. Smith said that the highly successful return to flight was a culmination of the hard work by the Edwards test team, Northrop Grumman, the 303rd AESG, and the AFFTC safety office. Capt Dan Itsara of the 452d FLTS said the return to flight mission lasted 9 and a-half hours and flew 51,000 feet above Edwards' restricted air space doing various test maneuvers. "We did regression work for the new flight control hardware, then expanded the aircraft operating envelope, and culminated the flight with some communication testing," Captain Itsara said. "Thanks to the efforts of everyone involved in this multi-party team, we achieved the first return to flight two weeks ahead of schedule", Lt Col. Janney said. Northrop Grumman's test pilot Chuck Olsen was the first to fly the Northrop Grumman-built Global Hawk during its return to flight mission and said flying the fully autonomous aircraft basically involves flying a key board and mouse. "You're in a ground shelter and you have to keep in mind there's actually a real airplane flying alongside other manned aircraft," Mr. Olsen said. "We are required to comply with all Air Force and FAA flight rules just like any other manned aircraft except there's no pilot on board, he said." "You don't get all the seat-of-the-pants sensory inputs a pilot normally experiences when flying," offered Janney, who flew chase in a C-12 during the return to flight mission. "It's a trade-off," Colonel Janney said referring to the lack of sensory perception. "The trade off is that when you're flying a plane you can see everything around you and you get the feel of the motion of the plane, but you don't get any of that when you're flying from the ground," he said. "The plus side to that," Janney joked, "is that it's really hard to spill your coffee when you're flying the Global Hawk." Flying the Global Hawk is not an easy task they all agreed, "It takes a different set of skills," Mr. Olsen said. The mission of the Global Hawk is an intelligence surveillance reconnaissance platform, Lt. Col. Smith said, "It's called ISR," he said. According to written reports the Global Hawk air vehicle is able to provide high resolution Synthetic Aperture Radar that can penetrate cloud-cover and sandstorms. It can survey as much as 40,000 square miles of terrain a day. The aircraft's systems have been designed to provide a broad spectrum of intelligence collection capability to support joint combatant forces in worldwide peace, contingency, and wartime operations. "Shortly after 9/11 the Global Hawk deployed for combat from Edwards and has been continuously deployed ever since," Colonel Smith said. He said the CTF has been testing Blocks 20 and 30 Global Hawks and eventually will be testing Block 40 Global Hawks at Edwards. Olsen and his teammate Tom Miller flew the Global Hawk through the first five hours of its return to flight mission and test pilots Tom Wayne, Mike Overson and Shaun Kelly completed the second half of the test and recovered the aircraft and landed it. "All systems operated just as expected," Olsen said. He said there were no abnormalities noted or observed. The war fighter isn't the only customer the Global Hawk supports; NASA currently has two Global Hawks that are being used to support the firefighters during California's recent and current wild fires. "It amazes me when I consider the tremendous effort the CTF, Northrop Grumman, and the 303rd team put forward to returning the aircraft to flight," Smith said, adding that it took a tremendous amount of engineering to diagnose the problem and come up with a fix. The Global Hawk program is now expected to move back into full scale flight test to support the war fighter.