PAUL LEWIS / PARIS
Central location uniting four existing sites will allow company to rapidly prototype manned and unmanned air vehicles
Northrop Grumman is planning to establish an equivalent of the Lockheed Martin Skunk Works to give it the ability to rapidly prototype air vehicles at a yet-to-be-decided centralised location.
The company's current "rapid response development capability" (RRDC) reaches across Northrop Grumman Integrated Systems' four facilities at Bethpage, El Segundo, Melbourne and Rancho Bernardo. "We're in the process of looking at several options for a central RRDC and it could be one of these four sites," says Bob Mitchell, Northrop Grumman vice- president advanced development systems.
Northrop Grumman Advanced Systems' 500-strong workforce is distributed across the four sites, and each tends to have a particular focus, such as sensor avionics in Melbourne and the recently flown Pegasus unmanned air vehicle demonstrator at El Segundo. The proposed dedicated RRDC, a decision on which is imminent, would be primarily focused at aircraft programmes. Northrop Grumman declines to reveal whether it has any advanced concept development programmes in hand for the new centre.
Unlike Lockheed Martin's Palmdale-based Skunk Works, the Northrop Grumman centre is not intended to be a production site. The company has not given the centre a name, but the "Scorpion Works" is one industry suggestion. Boeing has its own virtual advanced development organisation distributed throughout the company, known as the Phantom Works. Northrop Grumman's newly developed cyber warfare integration network (CWIN) provides the capability to link its main facilities in California, Florida and New York.
CWIN was recently used to virtually demonstrate Northrop Grumman's advanced information architecture. This is intended to allow long-endurance UAVs to store onboard intelligence data, which is then available to other airborne assets or even soldiers on the ground. An end of year demonstration is planned using a Northrop Grumman RQ-4A Global Hawk UAV and E-8C JSTARS airborne ground surveillance system.
Source: Flight International
