'Gray Eagle' Drone Fails All the Time, But Army Still Wants More

The Army's Gray Eagle at an unknown airfield. The Army's ambitious drone program is suffering from poor reliability and repeated delays, according to a Pentagon report. Photo: U.S. Army

The Gray Eagle is supposed to be the Army's own version of the Air Force's famous Predator drone. The Army wants its own version of the Predator so much, it's spending hundreds of millions of dollars to develop and buy 164 of the things through the year 2022. Problem is, the Army is having trouble getting the drone to, y'know, work.

Beginning in March 2011, 'poor reliability across all major subsystems' led to delays that would seemingly never end, according to a report from Edward Greer, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for developmental test and evaluation. During the same month, a Gray Eagle drone crashed in California after a faulty chip blocked a subsystem from sending commands to 'a portion of the aircraft's flight control surfaces,' Col. Timothy Baxter, the Army's project manager for unmanned aircraft systems, elaborated in an e-mail to Inside Defense.

'Flight testing was suspended,' Greer's report added. The faulty chip was replaced and testing resumed, but the Army was now left with fewer available flight hours. The drone's mean times between failures ' or the average time the drone or a component works without failure ' is also short. First, the drone itself has an average failure every 25 hours, short of a required minimum of 100 hours. The drone's ground control station has a rate of 27 hours before a failure, short of a required 300. The Army has since lowered the requirement to 150 hours. The Gray Eagle's sensors fare a bit better: 134 hours to 250 hours required.

Then the Gray Eagle was delayed again last October. The report concludes that for the 2011 fiscal year, the Gray Eagle is meeting only four of seven 'key performance parameters,' and the drone's 'system reliability continues to fall short of predicted growth,' which could be a problem for the upcoming tests scheduled for August. The Gray Eagle is also necessary for the Pentagon's plans to double its unmanned air force.

Like the Air Force's (now discontinued) Predator and its successor, the MQ-9 Reaper, the General Atomics-designed Gray Eagle is intended to operate for long periods at medium altitude while packing missiles and advanced sensors. A squadron of four Gray Eagles has been sent to Afghanistan, which 'continues to provide vital support to our soldiers in combat and continues to exceed the 80 percent operational available requirement every day,' Baxter wrote to Inside Defense.

But while the Army is also preparing to test its giant surveillance airship, the Gray Eagle is all the Army has for a Predator-esque hunter-killer drone.

Drones are the centerpiece of how the U.S. fights terrorists, with U.S. warplanes 31 percent ' or 1 in every 3 ' now robotic. The Navy is developing its own drone that can launch from an aircraft carrier, though it won't be ready until 2018 at the earliest. And in a time of relative budget austerity, the Air Force is funded for 65 Predator and Reaper squadrons of up to four drones per squadron, with the option of increasing to 85 squadrons. The Army is losing 100,000 soldiers, but funding for the Gray Eagle is going strong, with $150 million budgeted for construction costs and another $518 million to buy them.

Meanwhile, Greer's report mentions that the Gray Eagle's software is unstable, and fixes to problems 'have led to 11 unplanned software revisions.' But in general, software reliability has improved. Nonetheless, testing should be resumed 'only when the system demonstrates adequate readiness and satisfies [testing] entrance criteria,' notes the report.