{"id":15978,"date":"2012-02-10T00:46:37","date_gmt":"2012-02-10T03:46:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/?p=15978"},"modified":"2012-02-10T00:46:37","modified_gmt":"2012-02-10T03:46:37","slug":"uavs-canceled-in-favor-of-manned-aircraft","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/2012\/02\/10\/uavs-canceled-in-favor-of-manned-aircraft\/","title":{"rendered":"UAVs Canceled in Favor of Manned Aircraft"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In an interesting turnabout, the Air Force is responding to a tightening budget by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.airforcetimes.com\/news\/2012\/01\/defense-air-force-block-30-global-hawks-nix-012612w\/\">canceling the much vaunted RQ-4 <\/a><em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.airforcetimes.com\/news\/2012\/01\/defense-air-force-block-30-global-hawks-nix-012612w\/\">Global Hawk<\/a> <\/em>program and extending the life of the manned U-2 it was intended to replace.\u00a0 The decision reportedly affects the Block 30 <em>Global Hawk<\/em>, but not the Block 40 or Navy variants.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>The Air Force wants to terminate the Block 30 Northrop <!--more-->Grumman RQ-4 <em>Global Hawk <\/em>high-altitude unmanned surveillance aircraft, breathing new life into the five-decade-old U-2 program&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>The Air Force had been planning to buy 42 Block 30 aircraft. According to 2011 budget documents, the cost of each aircraft was around $215 million.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Northrop Grumman, the primary contractor for the <em>Global Hawk<\/em>, was quick to point out the shortcomings of the manned U-2.<\/p>\n<p>The &#8220;disposable&#8221; nature of UAVs was once one of their great selling points.\u00a0 It turns out that a $215M aircraft isn&#8217;t &#8220;disposable,&#8221; whether it has a person in it or not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an interesting turnabout, the Air Force is responding to a tightening budget by canceling the much vaunted RQ-4 Global Hawk program and extending the life of the manned U-2 it was intended to replace.\u00a0 The decision reportedly affects the Block 30 Global Hawk, but not the Block 40 or Navy variants. The Air Force wants to terminate the Block [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[134,5285,2789,2,36,1573,2657,53],"class_list":["post-15978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fighter-pilot","tag-air-force","tag-fighter-pilot","tag-global-hawk","tag-military","tag-navy","tag-rq-4","tag-u-2","tag-uav"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15978"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15978\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/christianfighterpilot.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}