Robert Mitchell, vice president, Special Programmes, Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems flew to London on Wednesday 22 February to present a lecture on Fire Scout UAV developments to an audience at the Royal Aeronautical Society. He had been invited by the Society’s Rotorcraft Group and faced an audience that comprise substantially of the Royal Navy’s EH101 Merlin community.

In the middle of January 2006, off NAS Patuxent River, Maryland, a Northrop Grumman RQ-8A Fire Scout unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) successfully completed nine autonomous landings on the USS Nashville over two days.

The landings, three on 16 January and a further six the following day, were made in calm conditions with no more than 15 knots of wind over the deck. They were made without using the harpoon capture system that will be fitted to naval ships when Fire Scout begins operations with the Navy sometime after 2008.

With an initial run of seven MQ-8Bs now scheduled for production for the Navy, key dates are the DT&E flight test which is expected later this year followed by OPEVAL and then IOC by the end of 2008.

Source and more info: shephard