Fire Scout over water.The Northrop Grumman Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE: NOC) is an aerospace and defense conglomerate that is the result of the 1994 purchase of Grumman by Northrop. The company is the third largest defense contractor for the U.S. Fire Scout name was burned into the history books when, on 18 January 2006, two RQ-8A drones performed nine autonomous shipboard ship·board n. 1. The condition of being aboard a ship: on shipboard. 2. Archaic The side of a ship. adj. landings onto the USS Nashville off the coast of Maryland. This event marks the first time a drone has made non-piloted vertical landings onto a moving US Navy ship at sea. The tests began with the Fire Scout taking off from Naval Air Station Patuxent River "Pax River" redirects here. For the river, see Patuxent River. Naval Air Station Patuxent River (IATA: NHK, ICAO: KNHK, FAA LID: NHK), also known as NAS Pax River, is a United States Naval Air Station located in St. , from where it flew to a designated test area, where the Nashville was loitering Loitering (IPA pronunciation: ['lɔɪtəˌrɪŋ] is an intransitive verb meaning to stand idly, to stop numerous times, or to delay and procrastinate. . The drone landed and took-off under its own control, guided only by the ship's unmanned air vehicle common automatic recovery system. Northrop Grumman is currently producing twelve MQ-8B drones; four for the US Navy and eight for the Army. The RQ8A is a test version of the newer MQ- series. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] |
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