Northrop Grumman’s Triton tipped defend Australia’s shores

Many in the aerospace world believe that aerial combat in the future will be dominated by so-called UAVs — ranging from high-flying spy planes and pilotless strike jets and helicopters launched from land and sea to a variety of smaller surveillance-only aircraft feeding vital information to commanders potentially located thousands of kilometres away from the actual fight.

However, the value of sophisticated and expensive remote controlled aircraft in the broad area surveillance role, where they can provide radar or visual coverage of vast areas of sea or land for long periods of time without worrying about crew rest breaks, is only now being fully explored.

Australian troops in Afghanistan enjoyed a constant feed of intelligence information from a fleet of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the RAAF Heron fleet based at Kandahar airfield and the Boeing Scan Eagle or Israeli-built Shadow that operated from Tarin Kowt.

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