Unmanned Aerial Vehicles by Steven Zaloga

Author:Steven Zaloga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
ISBN: 9781849089661
Publisher: Osprey Publishing
Published: 2011-06-07T04:00:00+00:00

A critical technological innovation in endurance UAVs was the advent of systems to permit communication between the ground control station and the UAV via space communication satellites. Here is a Predator with the nose removed, exposing its satellite uplink antenna. (USAF)

The US Navy and US Marine Corps did not want to wait for the futuristic Aquila, and when the Israelis demonstrated tactical UAVs in action in Lebanon in 1982, Secretary of the Navy John Lehman pushed the service into acquiring new UAVs off the shelf. The US firm AAI teamed with IAI on the Pioneer, which was based on existing Israeli designs, and it was selected over competitors in 1985. The AAI/IAI team would prove to be a durable partnership in American tactical UAV programs over the next two decades. The Pioneer could be launched either from ship or from land, using RATO for takeoff and parachutes or nets for recovery. The Pioneer was first deployed aboard the battleship USS Iowa in November 1987 while conducting patrols in the Strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf. The Pioneers were used to monitor Iranian Silkworm antiship missile sites and coastal traffic. The US Army began to explore the Pioneer as an alternative for the failed Aquila program. In spite of the success of the Pioneer, the US Department of Defense (DoD) halted any further purchases in 1988 in favor of developing a new common family of UAVs. This proved to be a major bungle as the Navy and Army had fundamentally different requirements for tactical UAVs, and a design that satisfied one service was unacceptable for the other. This mistake led to a decade of bureaucratic misadventures with neither the Army nor the Navy receiving a new tactical UAV. Instead, the Marine Corps Pioneers continued to toil away, remaining in service for more than two decades and still flying at the time this book was written.

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