Unmanned plane new workhorse of military

Eric Leake

Monday, Feb. 24, 2003 | 10:53 a.m.

The Predator is an unassuming war machine. Its pale shell stands just seven feet tall and its engine has more in common with a snowmobile than a jet.

Yet as the United States engages in more conflicts across the globe, the unmanned Predator is becoming the go-to plane for the longest and most dangerous jobs.

"It's a relatively inexpensive platform that we can send anywhere no matter the danger. All we risk is the airplane. We don't put any lives in danger," said Michael Estrada, a spokesman for Nellis Air Force Base, where the planes are based.

"There's very high demand. Commanders in all the services want Predators."

The demand is so high that no airmen who work on the Predator were available to talk to the media, Estrada said, because they were either deployed or working overtime training.

An expansion of the fleet at the Indian Springs Air Force Auxiliary Field is planned to help meet Predator demand. An environmental assessment of the plan began last week.

When it's complete, sometime in the winter of 2006, the base will have added 50 Predators and $120 million in construction. There will be three Predator squadrons.

Until then the base's two operational squadrons with their roughly 25 planes, will have to do. Each Predator system consists of four aircraft and can be operated by several crews, and the number of systems in a squadron can change.

Predators are crewed by a pilot and a sensor operator and a mission planner who sit in a trailer-like control center. The pilot flies the plane by radio or satellite control while looking through the plane's camera eye.

"The pilots and the sensor operators frequently refer to it as looking at an object through a soda straw," Estrada said.

Pilots are rotated into Predator detail for two-year stints, and then returned to conventional aircraft.

Defense News Managing Editor Bradley Peniston related piloting a Predator to flying a big model aircraft, only much more difficult.

"Predator crashes are not rare," he said. "And it's not because the pilots flying them are not skilled -- it's because it's difficult to fly these things.

"One of the things an unmanned aerial vehicle lets you do is put an eye in the sky you're not all worried about losing. A Predator can be shot down and nobody cries too many tears."

Nearly half of the 60-plane RQ-1 Predator fleet has crashed or been shot down since the unmanned spy plane entered the skies in 1994, according to a report last month by CNN.

Two Predators crashed outside Nellis in October. And the Air Force determined last week that another crash of a Nellis-based Predator in September in southwest Asia was the result of human error, when the pilot flew the plane into hazardous weather conditions.

While a fully loaded Predator, complete with radar and daytime and infrared cameras, costs about $3.5 million, that loss is a bargain, Estrada said, when compared with the $50 million price tag on the F-15E Strike Eagle.

The Predator program started with the Army in the early 1990s, Estrada said. The Air Force took over in 1995 and put the still developmental Predator in the air over the Balkans.

There Predators performed surveillance. They can fly continuously for more than a day, up to 36 hours, and feed images back at a distance.

After Sept. 11 Predators were called into Afghanistan and some were fitted with Hellfire missiles. Such a Predator assassinated a suspected al-Qaida lieutenant and five others when it fired on a car in Yemen in November.

"It's clear that this will become an increasingly common thing," Peniston said. "Now that we have them in the air, we're finding additional missions for them."

A new generation of Predators is in development. The MQ-9 high-altitude Predator will be larger, fly twice as high at 50,000 feet, have an upgraded jet engine and may be equipped with other armaments, including Stinger anti-aircraft missiles.

"Once we get this plan fully up, all the Predators will carry weapons themselves," Estrada said. "So if there is no other aircraft to shoot, the Predator will take the shot."

The new planes will join an unmanned fleet of Global Hawk surveillance planes and future unmanned combat air vehicles.

But the Predator and its relatives are not the end of airborne pilots. The human eye is hard to replace, Estrada said, and so is the human mind.

"It wouldn't replace the manned fighter," Estrada said. "Not in its entirety. There are still a lot of situations where you need a human in the cockpit to make those snap decisions."