|
At the Pentagon
UAV Programs Illustrate DoD’s Broken Procurement System
5
2,009
By Sandra I. Erwin
Lack of inter-service coordination in unmanned aircraft programs is wasting millions of dollars and slowing down much-needed modernization, said departing Pentagon acquisition chief John Young.
On his last day on the job, Young chastised the Air Force for not working more closely with the Army on purchases and upgrades of unmanned aircraft. Both services fly UAVs over war zones and recently agreed to consolidate their Predator and Warrior UAV programs, both of which are made by the same manufacturer.
The cooperation, however, has yet to materialize, Young said. During a recent meeting on UAV programs, he realized that the Army and the Air Force “still were doing their own separate thing on sensors.” He also was dismayed to find out that the Army had been testing a 2-liter engine for the Warrior UAV and that the Air Force had embarked on a similar program to qualify the same type of engine. “The two programs hadn’t even talked to each other,” said Young. “We brought them in a room and made them talk to each other.”
He also was disappointed that the Air Force had not allocated any funds in the fiscal 2010 budget to upgrade Predators with automatic-landing systems. Air Force UAVs crash far more frequently than the Army’s Shadow unmanned aircraft, which are equipped with automatic-landing systems.
“The Air Force built a budget that did not include auto-landing capability in the Predator,” Young said. “We’ve lost a third of all Predators we’ve ever bought … a significant fraction of losses are attributable” to operator errors in landings.
Since 1994 the Air Force has procured 195 Predators, and 65 have been lost due to Class A mishaps. A Class A mishap is one in which the total cost of property damage (including aircraft damage) is $1 million or greater or in which an aircraft is destroyed or missing.
Of the 65 mishaps, 36 were caused by human error -- and roughly half of those happened during the landing phase.
A Pentagon spokesman said there is no comparable data available for Shadow. “However, we feel that improvements to the ground stations and addition of auto-land capability could reduce the overall mishap rate for Predator by 25 percent.”
Young lamented that a relatively simple upgrade could have saved taxpayers millions of dollars. Each Predator costs between $3 million and $4 million.
|