Boeing MQ-25 관련 기사

[엽군]

역시 예상대로입니다. 전체 구매량이 겨우 76대랍니다. -_-;

Why Does Boeing's MQ-25 Prototype Look So Stealthy?

by Graham Warwick in Ares

출처 : http://aviationweek.com/blog/why-does-boeings-mq-25-prototype-look-so-stealthy

The answer may lie in the origins of the Navy’s long-gestated requirement for the so-called Carrier-Based Aerial Refueling System (CBARS), but what is obvious is that Boeing’s design bears a resemblance to one of the key aircraft in the history of stealth - Northrop’s 1980s Tacit Blue demonstrator.

The first teaser image released in December immediately raised questions about where the inlet was located on Boeing’s MQ-25 design. Earlier artists’ impressions of its concept for a carrier-based unmanned aircraft had the inlet mounted above the fuselage, similar to General Atomics’ Avenger. But such an inlet was not apparent in that first, tantalizing head-on image.

The inlet is no more apparent in the latest video. In fact, there doesn’t appear to be one! The only hint at its existence is a black line mid-way along the prototype’s upper fuselage stenciled with the words “Jet Intake  Danger.” This suggests Boeing’s MQ-25 has an inlet buried in its back and therefore completely flush - like that on the Tacit Blue.

The Tacit Blue was built for DARPA and the U.S. Air Force in part to show that a stealth aircraft could be designed that had curved surfaces, and was not entirely composed of faceted panels like Lockheed’s Have Blue and F-117. The design techniques developed for Tacit Blue were applied by Northrop to the smoothly curved B-2 stealth bomber.

Tacit Blue’s top-mounted flush inlet may have been stealthy, but it was hard to start, the flight-test crew at one point parking a C-130 in front of the aircraft so that its propwash would help start the airflow into the buried engines. There was also some flow separation in the inlet duct.

U.S. Army Force Museum

On Tacit Blue the engines exhausted from a slot nozzle located between V-tails - which also seems to be the case with Boeing’s MQ-25. The Tacit Blue’s wing and tails were unswept - as they appear to be on Boeing’s unmanned aerial refueler. Boeing’s design also has a chine running around the perimeter of the fuselage - a familiar characteristic of stealth designs.

By why? Stealth is not one the Navy’s requirements for CBARS. It was, once, a requirement for the CBARS’ predecessor, the Unmanned Carrier-Launched Surveillance Strike (UCLASS) system. But after a lengthy and contentious debate, UCLASS was downgraded to an unmanned tanker and the need for stealth removed.

Northrop Grumman - which built and flew the tailless, flying-wing X-47B under the predecessor to UCLASS, the Naval Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator program - dropped out of the running for CBARS after seeing the final request for proposals (RFP). The lack of a requirement for a stealthy platform that could be developed from the X-47B may have been one of the reasons.

Boeing’s MQ-25 design may have acquired its stealth features when it was UCLASS, and retained its shape through the many study phases that led up to the final CBARS RFP. It may be a bet placed by Boeing that the Navy, once it gets the Stingray on its carrier decks, will want to evolve the aircraft from an unmanned tanker to a surveillance/strike asset that needs stealth.

Another sign of stealth influence in the design’s origins that is visible in the video is the arrestor hook, which is enclosed behind a door when retracted. But the prototype seen being rolled out by Boeing’s Phantom Works in St. Louis does not have sawtooth edges on its gear doors or access panels, the existence of which is another typical signifier of stealth requirements.

Other design features of note. Boeing’s MQ-25 prototype has three air-data sensors on the nose - indicating triplex digital fly-by-wing flight control - but they are probes and not the flush sensors used on Northrop’s stealth-shaped X-47B. There is also what appears to be a camera under the flat nose, presumably to provide the ground operator a view ahead during takeoff and landing.

The main gear retracts forward into the fuselage inboard of the wing roots and the wing fold is just visible - a seam and bulge on the upper surface, over what is presumably the hinge and actuator, some way out from the wing root. There is also a pronounced vertical join that runs around the fuselage forward of the wing leading edge - the reason for which is far from clear.

출처 : https://www.defensenews.com/unmanned/2018/03/16/is-boeing-working-on-a-second-mq-25-drone-prototype/

Is Boeing working on a second MQ-25 drone prototype?

By: Valerie Insinna    March 16

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Defense News got the first in-person look at Boeing’s offering for the Navy’s MQ-25 competition, which it unveiled in December 2017. (Boeing)

ST. LOUIS — Boeing is confident it can win the Navy’s MQ-25 carrier-based tanker drone competition. In fact, it’s so bullish that it may already be on a path to building a second prototype.

During a March 6 visit to St. Louis, Defense News got to be the first media outlet to see the company’s MQ-25 offering up close and personal.

Asked if Boeing Phantom Works was working on a second MQ-25 prototype after having revealed the first one in December, its program director Don “BD” Gaddis and capture lead Dave Thieman laughed and pointedly steered the conversation in a different direction.

But another source indicated that another MQ-25 prototype could be revealed in short order.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Boeing has poured its investment dollars into creating not only one, but two test versions of an aircraft while a competition still rages on. In 2016, the company rolled out its T-X trainer jet in a glitzy ceremony, and then 15 minutes later took reporters to a nearby hanger to reveal a second aircraft going through tests.

If a second Boeing MQ-25 exists, it’s evidence of how badly the company wants to win the competition, which has been narrowed down to three vendors — Boeing, General Atomics and Lockheed Martin — after Northrop Grumman dropped out last year.

“This is a high-priority program,” said Phil Finnegan, a unmanned system analyst at the Teal Group. “They’re really intent on strengthening their position in unmanned systems.”

Boeing has poured its own money into maturing its carrier-based drone concept and is the first of the three vendors to make its MQ-25 air vehicle public.

Its Phantom Works division conducted the initial design review for what became its MQ-25 prototype in October 2012, back when the U.S. Navy was still pursuing an unmanned aircraft that could fly on and off the carrier to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance as well as strike missions, under a program called Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike, or UCLASS, Gaddis said.

The company quietly rolled out the prototype within the company in November 2014, just a month before the Navy announced it was pausing the UCLASS program.

“You can imagine how upset we were,” laughed Thieman.

Then, in 2016, the Navy killed UCLASS and began a new carrier drone program called Carrier-Based Aerial-Refueling System, or CBARS, which later became the MQ-25. Instead of an ISR and strike mission, the MQ-25 would act as an autonomous, unmanned tanker and relieve F/A-18E/F Super Hornets from refueling duties that take away from the fighters’ core mission set.

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But Boeing found that its UCLASS design was already a good fit for the tanking mission. Unlike Northrop, which invested heavily in a stealthy, flying-wing design aimed at a precision-strike mission, Boeing opted for a wing-body-tail air vehicle with limited low-observable features and a large payload bay.

“One of the things that people should be reminded of is that in UCLASS, tanking was one of the missions for UCLASS, and the company designed the airplane around that mission area as well as all of the other UCLASS mission areas,” Gaddis said. “So the other UCLASS missions are gone, but the tanking still remains, and we feel that this aircraft is right in the wheelhouse of that tanking requirement.”

Externally, Boeing’s MQ-25 prototype, also known as T1, is still the same as its UCLASS design. However, the company had to do significant rework on the mission systems side as the requirement shifted from surveillance to refueling.

“There will be some touches in the airplanes between T1 and [the first engineering and manufacturing development, or EMD, aircraft], but not many. The biggest change are in the mission systems,” Gaddis said. “The UCLASS requirements are quite different than the MQ-25 requirements for mission systems. And so when you go from big ISR to little ISR, that’s really the biggest change for MQ-25.”

Jerry Hendrix, a retired Navy captain and defense analyst at the Center for a New American Security, said Boeing’s prototype shows its UCLASS origins, with a large, robust fuselage “boat” that could carry fuel or — as originally developed — advanced sensor systems and ordnance.

“One area of concern, however, is the thin wing design, which is clearly influenced by the previous high-altitude ISR mission,” he said.

“I would expect, as the MQ-25 mission tanker program goes forward, that this prototype would evolve the wings to make them wider from their front leading edge to back and also thicker. This would make the platform more robust for sustained tanking missions as well as add additional fuel capacity to the design.”

Boeing’s MQ-25 reuses the fuselage the company originally designed for the Navy’s UCLASS program, an ISR and strike aircraft that morphed into the service's current requirement for a tanker drone. The company internally rolled out the air vehicle in 2014. (Boeing)

As The Drive has noted, Boeing’s design features a flush dorsal jet intake that supplies air to the engine, which as of yet has not been specified by the company. According to Gaddis, the company’s MQ-25 stores its fuel in tanks surrounding the engine, and the inner section of its fold-up wings are “wet,” meaning the fuel moves freely within that part of the wing.

According to the Navy’s requirements, the MQ-25 must be able to deliver 14,000 pounds of fuel at distances of 500 nautical miles from an aircraft carrier.

Gaddis said Boeing’s design meets that requirement with margin to spare, telling Defense News that it “carries a ton of gas.” But with a competition still ongoing, he declined to detail exactly how much the air vehicle can carry.

The Navy will decide the MQ-25 competition in August, choosing a single vendor and awarding a contract for the four EMD aircraft, with an option for three more test assets.

In its fiscal 2019 budget request, the Navy announced that it would begin production in FY23 with a procurement of four drones, ahead of an initial operational capability in FY26. It plans to buy 72 aircraft over the course of the program.

Boeing should be ready for the first flight of its MQ-25 shortly after the Navy makes its downselect decision in August, but it still has a lot of work to do before then, Gaddis said.

Besides moving its prototype through the standard testing process that all aircraft go through before first flight, it also needs to finish its statement of work. Boeing — like the other competitors — was awarded a contract to refine its MQ-25 concept, which includes activities such as software integration and improving its open-systems architecture.

It also includes providing data about how to handle the drone aboard the deck of an aircraft carrier, which Boeing is demonstrating through a series of drills in St. Louis, Missouri. The company mapped out the deck of an aircraft carrier on the tarmac at Lambert Field, and Boeing employees have practiced how to safely and efficiently move its MQ-25 around the ship by taxiing it around, tested the arresting gear and hooking it into a catapult.

출처 : https://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2018/02/02/boeing-views-the-navys-mq-25-carrier-based-drone-as-a-must-win/#139da20d621e

Boeing Views Navy's MQ-25 Carrier-Based Drone Contract As A Must Win

카페회원들의 안전을 위해 iframe 태그를 제한 하였습니다. 관련공지보기▶

카페회원들의 안전을 위해 iframe 태그를 제한 하였습니다. 관련공지보기▶

Loren Thompson , CONTRIBUTORI write about national security, especially its business dimensions.  Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

You wouldn't think a company that just told Wall Street it will deliver over 800 jetliners this year would assign top priority to winning a Navy program aimed at buying a mere 76 unmanned aircraft, but that's what Boeing has done. The world's biggest aerospace company has decided the carrier-based MQ-25 drone is the beginning of a revolution in naval aviation, and it is determined to be on board.

MQ-25, popularly known as the Stingray, is the latest in a series of Navy efforts aimed at investigating how unmanned aircraft might be integrated into the air wings that fly off of its supercarriers. Large-deck aircraft carriers are the signature combat system of the joint force, and the Navy has been experimenting for two decades with ways in which drones might make its aviation arm more lethal, survivable and versatile. Now it thinks it has the answer: an aerial refueling drone that can extend the reach of carrier-based aircraft by hundreds of miles.

The basic idea is that MQ-25, carrying 15,000 pounds of fuel, would rendezvous with carrier-based fighters and jamming aircraft at the outer edge of their combat radius, giving them the legs to fly much further -- maybe up to a thousand nautical miles from the carrier. This has major operational benefits. First, it enables the carrier to stay far away from hostile forces. Second, it frees up fighters currently used for aerial refueling to do other combat missions. Third, it provides a long-endurance drone that can also be used for collecting reconnaissance.

Boeing

Boeing released this head-on view of its proposed MQ-25 drone design in December.

And perhaps most importantly, MQ-25 will enable the Navy to get comfortable with operating both manned and unmanned aircraft off the same deck. That is probably what intrigues Boeing, a contributor to my think tank, the most. The way Boeing sees it, using drones for tanking is just one facet of an impending sea change in naval aviation. Once the Navy gets comfortable with drones on flight decks, there are plenty of missions besides tanking to which unmanned technology might be applied.

The Navy tacitly acknowledged this when it selected the designation MQ, because "M" in military nomenclature means multimission ("Q" means unmanned). Having already experimented with drones as penetrating strike systems, counter-terror weapons and airborne intelligence collectors, the Navy has a good grasp of all the things a drone might do if it can fly off of an aircraft carrier. Aerial refueling just happens to be the most pressing mission. But that's the mission where Boeing's entry in the competition must prove itself.

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It helps that Boeing has more experience than any other company in the world with aerial refueling, however it also has more experience than any competitor with naval aviation. The company has been selling planes to the Navy for nearly 90 years, and one of its heritage enterprises -- McDonnell Douglas -- built the first jet-powered aircraft to land on a carrier at sea. All of the strike fighters and jamming aircraft that fly off carrier decks today were manufactured by Boeing. Boeing very much wants to preserve its lead it in that business.

In order to do that, it has to build the first carrier-based drone that has ever entered serial production. Beyond the revolution in warfighting that this might ultimately portend, though, the company sees a second transformation in progress: the Naval Air Systems Command -- NAVAIR -- is reorganizing to deliver new technology to warfighters faster. Having long been locked in cutthroat competition with Airbus for dominance of the commercial transport market, Boeing thinks it has learned some lessons about how to bring disruptive technology to market quickly.

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The Boeing proposal for MQ-25 leverages past work on sea-based drones and the company's own internal investments to offer a fast path to initial operating capability, but at relatively low cost and with minimal risk. The main focus of the proposal is on satisfying the requirements of the tanking mission while demonstrating carrier suitability, but as per the Navy's solicitation, the Boeing aircraft will include infrared and optical sensors plus provisions for a search radar. Competing entries from Lockheed Martin and General Atomics will presumably do the same.

Boeing has been reserved in discussing the features of its offering, but based on what is publicly known, naval expert Tyler Rogoway observed last month that the company is offering a "medium-altitude, medium-endurance unmanned platform which could be adapted to perform a whole series of roles beyond that of an aerial tanker." The on-board reconnaissance capabilities of the drone will significantly enhance the situational awareness of carrier strike groups, and the large internal volume of the airframe could be readily adapted to diverse payloads.

However, the Navy has good reason for emphasizing the tanking mission. Roughly a quarter of its strike fighters are currently tied up providing aerial refueling to other fighters in the carrier air wing, and having a drone that can take over that mission would make the entire wing more lethal. MQ-25's refueling capability will also be available to carrier-based Hawkeye radar planes, and to the stealthy F-35C fighter when it joins the fleet. The range and endurance improvement this will deliver to the carrier air wing will help address rising threats, particularly in the Western Pacific.

For Boeing, though, the MQ-25 has a larger meaning. It potentially offers a pathway to the future of naval warfare at a time when production of the company's carrier-based Super Hornets is gradually being eclipsed by the F-35C. Like the Air Force's TX trainer, MQ-25 is an opportunity to continue building smaller military aircraft until the next generation of strike fighters materializes. Because Boeing tries to balance its business between commercial and military markets, the company is determined to do what it must to win the competition for the first unmanned aircraft to join the Navy's carrier air wings.

[Black Knights (윤재산)]

가장 무인화되기 쉽고? 수요도 적은 기종을 시범사업처럼 굴려서 이후 사업에서 화수분처럼 본격적으로 뽑을듯합니다

록마나 보잉도 그러니까 lo디자인이 요구도에 있던없던 슬쩍 신경을 쓴것 같구요

[엽군]

록마와 보잉 이외에도 제너럴 아토믹도 사업에 참가 중입니다. MQ-1/9으로 탑재체계에 대한 검증이 끝난 시스템에 미 공군에서 유사체계를 실험적으로 구매했던 Avenger C라는 기체도 있어서, 비용 경쟁으로 가면 100% 질테니 Potenital에서라도 먹고 들어가야 할거에요. 발상을 좀 바꿔보면, 요구도는 긴 항속거리에 전술정찰로 항모전단의 눈 역할을 하면서 기름탱크도 되어주는 물건이니까... Flying wing 형상의 변형들이 내부에 기름 쟁일 체적이 크니까... 기존의 MQ-9, Avenger C 와는 확실히 스텔스를 제외한 성능면에서도 장점을 가진다는 계산 같습니다.

[Black Knights (윤재산)]

aw에 따르면 담주에 제너럴 아토믹 것을 공개할 모양입니다

[엽군]

올려주신 자료 잘 봤습니다. 제법 예쁘게 잘 나왔네요. 사실 전 AVENGER C나 RQ-170이 한국군에게 제일 필욯한 장비라고 생각했었어요. ㅋㅋㅋ.