Compliments of the United States Air Force
purveyors of death and destruction since World War I

The MQ-9 Reaper

Posted by Nifty Nick . 8/12/2009

From Fox News:

BALAD AIR BASE, Iraq — The airplane is the size of a jet fighter, powered by a turboprop engine, able to fly at 300 mph and reach 50,000 feet. It's outfitted with infrared, laser and radar targeting, and with a ton and a half of guided bombs and missiles.

The Reaper is loaded, but there's no one on board. Its pilot, as it bombs targets in Iraq, will sit at a video console 7,000 miles away in Nevada.
The arrival of these outsized U.S. "hunter-killer" drones, in aviation history's first robot attack squadron, will be a watershed moment even in an Iraq that has seen too many innovative ways to hunt and kill.

That moment, one the Air Force will likely low-key, is expected "soon," says the regional U.S. air commander. How soon? "We're still working that," Lt. Gen. Gary North said in an interview.

The Reaper's first combat deployment is expected in Afghanistan, and senior Air Force officers estimate it will land in Iraq sometime between this fall and next spring. They look forward to it.

"With more Reapers, I could send manned airplanes home," North said.

The Associated Press has learned that the Air Force is building a 400,000-square-foot expansion of the concrete ramp area now used for Predator drones here at Balad, the biggest U.S. air base in Iraq, 50 miles north of Baghdad. That new staging area could be turned over to Reapers.

It's another sign that the Air Force is planning for an extended stay in Iraq, supporting Iraqi government forces in any continuing conflict, even if U.S. ground troops are drawn down in the coming years.

The estimated two dozen or more unmanned MQ-1 Predators now doing surveillance over Iraq, as the 46th Expeditionary Reconnaissance Squadron, have become mainstays of the U.S. war effort, offering round-the-clock airborne "eyes" watching over road convoys, tracking nighttime insurgent movements via infrared sensors, and occasionally unleashing one of their two Hellfire missiles on a target.

From about 36,000 flying hours in 2005, the Predators are expected to log 66,000 hours this year over Iraq and Afghanistan.

The MQ-9 Reaper, when compared with the 1995-vintage Predator, represents a major evolution of the unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.

At five tons gross weight, the Reaper is four times heavier than the Predator. Its size — 36 feet long, with a 66-foot wingspan — is comparable to the profile of the Air Force's workhorse A-10 attack plane. It can fly twice as fast and twice as high as the Predator. Most significantly, it carries many more weapons.

While the Predator is armed with two Hellfire missiles, the Reaper can carry 14 of the air-to-ground weapons — or four Hellfires and two 500-pound bombs.

"It's not a recon squadron," Col. Joe Guasella, operations chief for the Central Command's air component, said of the Reapers. "It's an attack squadron, with a lot more kinetic ability."

"Kinetic" — Pentagon argot for destructive power — is what the Air Force had in mind when it christened its newest robot plane with a name associated with death.

"The name Reaper captures the lethal nature of this new weapon system," Gen. T. Michael Moseley, Air Force chief of staff, said in announcing the name last September.

General Atomics of San Diego has built at least nine of the MQ-9s thus far, at a cost of $69 million per set of four aircraft, with ground equipment.

The Air Force's 432nd Wing, a UAV unit formally established on May 1, is to eventually fly 60 Reapers and 160 Predators. The numbers to be assigned to Iraq and Afghanistan will be classified.

The 432nd Wing has a distinguished combat history. It served during the Vietnam War at Udorn RTAFB in far Northern Thailand and flew Mig-killing F-4 fighters and fearless RF-4 reconnaissance aircraft. The Air Force's only "aces" of the war, all captains at the time belonged to the 432nd. Usually flying together as a crew, pilot Steve Ritchie and weapon system operator Chuck DeBellevue of the 555 TFS bagged 5 and 6 Migs, respectively. Jeff Feinstein, a WSO with the 13th TFS bagged 5 Migs.

(The two crew positions in the F-4 Phantom II are the pilot in the front seat, and the weapon system operator in the back seat. The pilot is, of course, a PILOT, the anointed first-born son of the Air Force. The weapon system operator is a navigator. He is a "rated officer" but he is no where near a pilot on the Air Force scale of "worthiness" he is barely a step or two above intelligence officers and maintenance pukes in the hierarchy.

Once the F-4 is in the air it becomes quite a complicated machine. It was originally built by the Navy. If it had been built by the Air Force it would have had only one seat, for a pilot, of course. At first the Air Force assigned pilots to the back seat of the F-4, but they griped and bitched about not being able to see out the front window and not getting any flying time and having to learn how to run all the complicated radar and missile systems controlled from the back seat.

So the Air Force selected a group of navigators who had the physical and mental "right stuff" and made them Weapon System Officers for the back seat of the F-4. Everyone was happy. The grumpy pilots got out of the back seat, the navigators got to fly in fighters and it worked!

Until the day we retired the last F-4 out of the Air Force Reserve and it flew West to the boneyard, there were arguments about which crew position in the F-4 was more important. It depended on who you asked. The pilot described his WSO as his "passenger" or the "gib" (guy in back) or the "ballast" or the "whizzo" (after they saw the movie 'Top Gun'). The WSO referred to the pilot as the "driver" or the "nose gunner".

Most F-4 squadrons had "formed crews" where the same pilot and WSO always flew together. After a while they became like dance partners, they could anticipate each others' actions and speak in short phrases. Handy stuff in a dogfight when quick reactions mean life. A lot of pilots taught their WSOs the basics of flying the F-4. That saved an unknown number of lives and aircraft during Vietnam when WSOs brought home F-4s with incapacitated pilots.

What I'll miss most is the excitement in intelligence debriefing after a good mission, and the sweaty, exhausted pilots and WSOs pointing out on the maps exactly what they had seen and done and the fantastic bomb damage assessment the forward air controller had given their marksmanship. What does Reaper Intelligence do after a mission?)