Northrop selected to build BAMS drone

[unhappycamper]

Northrop selected to build BAMS drone
By Gayle S. Putrich - Staff writer
Posted : Tuesday Apr 22, 2008 21:11:04 EDT

Northrop Grumman will build the Navy’s much-anticipated Broad Area Maritime Surveillance (BAMS) drone, beating out Boeing and the Lockheed Martin-General Atomics team for the $1.16 billion developmental contract.

The deal, announced by the Navy late Tuesday, includes funding for two unmanned aircraft, a systems integration lab, and two mission control systems: one primary base system and a second designed for a forward operating base.

This is a huge deal for us,” said Bill Balderson, the Navy’s top aviation acquisition official. “It represents the U.S. Navy getting real traction in the UAV world.”

The drones — which will be expected to remain in the air for long periods of time and monitor a 2,000-nautical-mile radius — will collect information on enemies, do battle-damage assessments, conduct port surveillance and provide support to Navy forces at sea. Each aircraft is expected to serve for 20 years.

Northrop’s Global Hawk beat out a highly modified unmanned Gulfstream G550 offered by Boeing and the Predator-based Mariner UAV offered by the Lockheed-General Atomics team.


Rest of article at: http://www.navytimes.com/news/2008/04/defense_bams_042208/



uhc comment: The new BAMS drone is a derivative of the Global Hawk and has been designated the RQ-4N. No cost estimates (naturally), but the GH costs around $3,500,000 a pop. I'd expect the cost to increase somewhere between 10 to 25 percent.