ROBOT PLANES GLOBAL HAWK TO DO MORE THAN SPY FOR MILITARY.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

PALMDALE - Northrop Grumman's unmanned Global Hawk spy plane has potential applications outside its military use, a program official said.

Carrying digital and infrared cameras and radar that can pick out a human being from 65,000 feet in the air, the computer-controlled jets can watch for illegal immigrants, fishing boats or smugglers' airplanes and can check the health of farm crops.

``When we went to Australia, approximately half the missions we flew were nonmilitary,'' said William Walker, a retired U-2 spy plane pilot who is Northrop Grumman's business development manager for Global Hawk.

He spoke last week at an Antelope Valley Board of Trade luncheon.

A Global Hawk in April 2001 flew from Edwards Air Force Base to Australia, becoming the first unmanned aircraft to fly across the Pacific Ocean. It then worked with Australian and U.S. Navy ships in joint exercises.

In civilian work, it surveyed isolated airfields for the comings and goings of airplanes that might be smuggling, and it watched off the coast for ships carrying illegal immigrants.

The craft can stay aloft for more than 30 hours. One flew from the United States to Portugal, scanned the ocean off that country's shore for eight hours, then flew back.

For the business group, Walker showed black-and-white digital images that a Global Hawk took of the program's testing center at Edwards Air Force Base, zeroing in to show people walking through the center's gates.

He also displayed a photographic-quality radar image and an infrared image of an aircraft parking area with spots of cooler pavement looking like shadows of airplanes that had been recently parked there.

Global Hawks are produced at U.S. Air Force Plant 42 in Palmdale. Production is expected eventually to reach about 24 a year, and there have been six built so far.

Of the six, one crashed during testing at Edwards and two while in use in Afghanistan, where they were sent even though still in developmental stages.

Northrop Grumman officials announced last month that the company will use its own money to build another craft to test new technologies, a move taken because of increased interest from potential customers.

In Afghanistan, the Global Hawks have been working with the famous U-2 spy plane, a version of which was first produced in the 1950s.

``It's not our intent to replace it. It may work out that way someday,'' Walker said of the U-2.

Walker noted that the two Global Hawk crashes occurred without producing an international incident. In the 17 years he was flying U-2 reconnaissance jets for the Air Force, six pilots died in crashes, he said.

When the Global Hawks crashed, he emphasized, ``Nobody died.''

While the Global Hawk flies itself by computer, a licensed pilot on the ground keeps watch on it via radio and satellite links and communicates with air traffic controllers along its route.

Unless the pilot intervenes, the aircraft flies itself from takeoff to landing.

Federal Aviation Administration officials are wary of letting unmanned aircraft fly in the nation's airways, and the manufacturers are trying to work out arrangements to make such flights routine, Walker said.

CAPTION(S):

photo

Photo:

A Global Hawk flies in military testing. Northrop Grumman officials say the unmanned reconnaissance jet also has great civilian potential.