According to DARPA, modern military missions are predicated on a huge engagement from aircraft. Before the fight begins fighters and bombers scream past enemy lines disabling enemy radar and anti-aircraft facilities that can destroy slower airborne assets. Though those missions are often successful they do carry with them the risk that pilots and other operators could be shot down, killed or trapped behind enemy lines. While UAVs are an immediate and obvious remedy for removing humans from the first phase of a military campaign current systems are just too slow to evade incoming fire.
To help solve this problem, or at least find a temporary solution until autonomous supersonic aircraft are built, DARPA has suggested that large transport planes like the C-130 could be used as airborne UAV carriers.
“We want to find ways to make smaller aircraft more effective, and one promising idea is enabling existing large aircraft, with minimal modification, to become ‘aircraft carriers in the sky’,” said Dan Patt, DARPA program manager. “We envision innovative launch and recovery concepts for new UAS designs that would couple with recent advances in small payload design and collaborative technologies.”
As part of DARPA’s call for ideas, the agency imagines that a transport craft could be reconfigured to launch and recover low-cost, small UAVs that would conduct mission critical surveillance and attack sorties. Whether launched UAVs would return to a mothership or a complex arrangement of caravanning transports that provide “on-demand” rebasing is still unknown. Given the fluidity of combat I’d imagine that transports would drop their payload, escape dangerous airspace and return only to pick up drones that need to land immediately.
With a relatively short development period of four years DARPA is asking a lot of anyone willing to submit a proposal. Among the many technologies I imagine will need to be developed or upgraded are precision navigation systems, miniaturized weapons-capable drones, advanced flight logistics, radar and stealth systems, and of course a full retrofit of one the Air Force’s large transport craft.
Adding to the difficulty of this endeavor is DARPA’s short timeline for idea development. Anyone wishing to propose a solution to this seemingly stop-gap measure needs to submit their work by November 26, just over two weeks away. All I can say is good luck to anyone who tries!
Image Courtesy of DARPA