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发帖数: 2045 | 1 Air Force's U-2 aircraft get new lease on life
The draft of the federal budget for 2013 takes an ax to the rival Global
Hawk program. An Air Force general says the U-2, a design that dates to the
1950s, is "the stronger system."
Read more: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-57382692-76/air-forces-u-2-aircraft-get-new-lease-on-life/
Score one for old-school aircraft against the upstart drones.
Perhaps it's just a brief respite from the seemingly inevitable winds of
change propelling unmanned aircraft ever higher in the Pentagon's airpower
depth charts, but the venerable U-2 spy plane has won a key vote of
confidence over the unmanned RQ-4 Global Hawk. That victory came not in a
head-to-head aerial dogfight, but in a more bureaucratic conveyance: the
draft of the federal budget for the U.S. government's fiscal 2013.
"The Administration proposes to end production of the Global Hawk unmanned
aerial reconnaissance vehicle," says the budget proposal (PDF), released
last week. "High altitude reconnaissance operations will continue with the
manned U-2 aircraft which can perform the same missions as the Global Hawk,
but at a lower cost."
The Global Hawk line item drops from $342 million in the current fiscal year
to zero for the coming year. The Air Force's fleet of 30-plus U-2 aircraft,
meanwhile, are already pretty much bought and paid for. The last delivery
of a U-2 to the Air Force from manufacturer Lockheed Martin was in 1989.
The Air Force didn't mince words about the selection. "The U-2 is a stronger
system, so we're going to go with the stronger system," Maj. Gen. Edward L.
Bolton Jr., deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force for budget, said in
a Pentagon news briefing last week. The base budget for the Air Force in
the 2013 proposal stands at $154.3 billion, down from $162.5 billion this
year. | l*****i
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