Senate Wants Robo-Copter, ASAP

The Fire Scout unmanned attack copter isn't supposed to be heading into battle until 2012, at the earliest. The
Senate Appropriations Committee is asking the Army to begin fielding the thing ASAP -- maybe even next year, *Defense News *reports.

It's a big change for the whirly-bot, which "only a few years ago seemed all but dead," Christian notes.

The MQ-8B Fire Scout "began in 1999 as a U.S. Navy program to build an armed supply-reconnaissance UAV [unmanned aerial vehicle] that could land autonomously on an aircraft carrier," says Defense News. Then it was supposed to replace to an aging Marines Corps drone -- until it was shelved. In 2004, the Army started working with Northrop to make it part of the service's massive Future Combat Systems modernization plans, with a target deployment date of "between 2012 and 2014."

Now, the Senate is asking the Army not to wait for the rest of Future Combat Systems to get the robo-chopper up the sky. The Army is mulling an earlier deployment. And Northrop's Rene Freeland says, "The Fire Scout is ready."

The 9-foot-tall MQ-8B has a 172-mile line of sight at its 20,000-foot ceiling. It has stub-like wings and a takeoff weight of 3,000 pounds, including up to 600 pounds of weapons and supplies. It is intended to do surveillance, fire weapons and land on unprepared ground. Its 10.7-megabits-per-second data link can transmit imagery to the mission payload operator.
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The MQ-8B’s weapon racks can carry the Hellfire anti-tank missile; the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon, a laser-guided
2.75-inch folding-fin rocket; and the GBU-44/B Viper Strike, a lightweight, laser-guided variant of Northrop Grumman’s 44-pound
Brilliant Anti-armor Munition glide bomb.*