Gray Eagle STOL and Gray Eagle 25M are the best options for Army aviation as it assesses where to move from its current inflection point.
By GENERAL ATOMICS AERONAUTICAL SYSTEMS, INC.ARLINGTON, Va.: The Army aviation chief, Maj. Gen. Michael Lundy, wants to spend the service’s shrunken aircraft acquisition budget — down about 40 percent over the past three years — on manned rather than unmanned aircraft. After all, this is the Army. “We’ve got a lot of unmanned stuff out there,” Lundy told an Association…
By Richard WhittleVIRGINIA BEACH, VA.: Manned-Unmanned Teaming, when manned aircraft crews control drones from their cockpit, is a child of the drone revolution still in its infancy. So maybe it’s no surprise that Army Apache helicopter units with new AH-64Es equipped to control MQ-1C Grey Eagle armed drones have gotten off to a crawl rather than a run using…
By Richard WhittleNATIONAL HARBOR, MD: Many new threats, but few new weapons to meet them. That’s what the cash-strapped future holds for the entire Army, but especially for the service’s most expensive branch, the helicopter corps. So the challenge is to teach old birds new tricks. As budgets tighten, the service’s strategy to keep up with the…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.LAS VEGAS: As the Army institutionalizes robotic systems that began as ad hoc expedients for Iraq and Afghanistan, the Chief of Staff wants drones in every combat aviation brigade and every division — even at the price of spreading them thinner across the force. The Army’s first company of Grey Eagle UAVs, a variant of…
By Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.