Global Hawk Robot Spy Plane to Patrol Austrailia

Posted 21 Apr 2001 at 18:01 UTC by The Swirling Brain

Take a huge boeing 737 airplane, remove the cockpit, add a robot brain and some reconnaissance gear and what do you get? You get a Global Hawk! The maker of Global Hawk Northrup Grumman has already made some for the US Air Force who already uses them, but now UPI informs us that they'll be making some for Austrailia too. Another article here. Global Hawk will taxi and take off and fly autonomously from Edwards Airforce base and then patrol Austrailia's shorelines without a pilot. Global Hawk can fly up to 65,000 feet and can stay aloft for up to 30 hours scanning bunches of stuff with it's sensor array.

You can read more about Global Hawk here, here and here and even about one that crashed. You can also see some more photos of Global Hawk here, here, here, here, here and here.

More URLs., posted 22 Apr 2001 at 10:45 UTC by The Swirling Brain » (Master)

Here's A Yahoo Article. And Here's yet another Global Hawk Site.

Boeing 737 comparison, posted 4 Nov 2001 at 16:55 UTC by steve » (Master)

Just to clarify - the Global Hawk has a wing size equivalent to Boeing 737 according to several descriptions. It isn't a modified 737 or based on the same design. That should be pretty obvious if you look at the photos but somebody asked me about it so I thought I'd point it out to head off further questions...