High Altitude Long Endurance Unmanned Aircraft Series Sets New Flight Record

The U.S. Air Force RQ-4 Global Hawk and other variants of Northrop Grumman Corporation's High Altitude Long Endurance (HALE) Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) series continued to prove their value to U.S. government agencies by flying more intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) mission hours in one week than ever before.

The UAS series flew 781 hours from Sept. 10-16. The Air Force's RQ-4 Global Hawk flew 87 percent of the missions; the U.S. Navy's Broad Area Maritime Surveillance- Demonstration (BAMS-D) aircraft and NASA's Global Hawk hurricane research asset flew the rest. HALE's far-reaching weekly record surpasses the company's previous weekly flight record of 665 hours set in February.

"There are at least two Global Hawks in the air at all times providing indispensable ISR information to those that need it," said Mick Jaggers, Global Hawk UAS program director, Northrop Grumman Aerospace Systems. "The 2014 fiscal year was the most active yet for the Global Hawk, with a 40 percent year over year increase in flight hours."

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