UNMANNED CRAFT REVEALED.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

EL SEGUNDO - Northrop Grumman unveiled on Tuesday a design for a robot bomber for the U.S. Navy to fly off aircraft carriers and spy on enemy shores or ships and attack anti-aircraft missile sites.

Derived from the pilotless $40 million Pegasus aircraft that Northrop Grumman financed itself, the design looks like a hybrid between Pegasus' kite shape and the flying wing look of the company's B-2 stealth bomber, and would be controlled by computer rather than a pilot.

``When you don't necessarily have air supremacy and you do have to worry about air-defenses assets, that's when when it's particularly important to have unmanned vehicles,'' said Jan Walker, a spokeswoman for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Expecting to triple its spending on unmanned aircraft over the next seven years, the Pentagon wants them to perform what it calls dangerous, dirty and just plain dull missions.

Those tasks include attacking enemy radar and missile sites as well as conducting surveillance missions that last for hours, missions that human crews would find tedious.

DARPA's funding for Navy and Air Force unmanned aircraft is intended to create more advanced robot craft able to ``react to changes in their environment,'' Walker said, like spotting a target that mission planners didn't know about, or getting shot at by an undetected enemy missile site.

Once a new target is detected, an operator on the ground can tell the plane to attack it, Walker said.

``We view the operator for these unmanned vehicles as more of a battlefield manager than an actual pilot,'' she said. ``They will be flying themselves.''

The U.S. military's existing unmanned aerial vehicles include the remote-controlled Predator, designed as a surveillance plane but used to shoot missiles at targets in Afghanistan. The small, propeller-driven Predators are flown by pilots on the ground.

A more advanced craft is Northrop Grumman's computer-controlled GlobalHawk, which has flown across the Pacific Ocean and was sent into combat in Afghanistan, although it has not been approved for production.

A Defense Department report released last month said the Pentagon plans to invest $10 billion by the end of the decade in unmanned aircraft capable of a variety of combat missions, increasing their numbers from about 90 today to about 350 in 2010.

``It's a business area that has a lot of different potential applications, not just reconnaissance and surveillance but strike,'' Northrop Grumman spokesman Jim Hart said.

At Edwards Air Force Base, Boeing, the Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are testing two X-45A unmanned planes as part of the Air Force program to field a robot bomber. Boeing last year got $400 million to build two larger, more advanced test planes to be called the X-45B.

DARPA and the Navy have paid Northrop Grumman and Boeing $12 million each since 2000 to do design work and studies on the Navy unmanned combat aerial vehicle, or UCAV. The companies are hoping to get a go-ahead to build two test aircraft to demonstrate their designs.

The Pentagon has proposed putting more money next year into such UCAVs and folding together work on the Navy craft and the independent effort involving the Air Force and DARPA.

A decision on whether to build the Navy test craft should be made this year, Walker said.

Northrop Grumman says its design can meet the Air Force's requirements as well.

If Northrop Grumman puts a Navy UCAV into production, a candidate for an assembly site would be Northrop Grumman's Palmdale plant, which already assembles Global Hawk spy planes and target drones.

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Photo:

(color ran in Business section and AV edition only) This unmanned combat aerial vehicle, a robot bomber in the shape of a flying wing, is one of the new era of craft manufactured by Northrop Grumman.

Northrop Grumman