Defense Technology International - October 2007 - (Page 28) DISPATCHES GLOBAL SOFTWARE HARDBALL Boeing and Northrop Grumman square off over UCAS technology DAVID AXE•WASHINGTON omething strange happened in April when it came time to place bids for the U.S. Navy’s Unmanned Combat Air SystemDemonstrator program. The Navy was expected to budget $640 million for the seven-year e ort to fly fighter-like drones o aircraft carriers. Northrop Grumman bid a plan costing almost exactly that amount. Boeing’s plan, on the other hand, was priced at $1.2 billion. So it was no surprise when Northrop Grumman snagged the contract with its X-47 model, leaving the Boeing X-45 without a patron. Thereafter, the Navy asked for the X-45s to be destroyed, according to a Boeing source. Boeing’s bid is indicative of what o cials believe will be a challenging program. One big hurdle is refining the software to control a drone as it taxis, takes o from and lands on aircraft carriers, and flies alongside other drones on complex missions. In the wake of the decision, the Navy is reportedly asking to mine Boeing’s software to shore up potentially serious shortcomings in Northrop Grumman’s drone shop. It seems to some observers of the UCAS program that Northrop Grumman was always more focused on the X-47 vehicles, while Boeing was primarily interested in software development. “They [Northrop Grumman] were rightly focused on carrier landing, deck handling and takeo , but there are many other mission phases,” says one former member of the X-45 team, who requests anonymity. Not so, says Tighe Parmenter, X-47 business development manager at Northrop Grumman. He claims that Northrop Grumman always had a robust software development e ort relying on a “surrogate” test plane, but “chose not to talk about it due to the competitive nature” of the evolving program. “Software is a challenge,” Parmenter U.S. MARINE CORPS S Boeing missioncontrol software has been used to fly multiple Scan Eagle drones together. admits. He says the X-47 team will benefit from development work on the company’s Fire Scout and Global Hawk drones, as well as from code provided by the military. Aspects of the latter have Boeing crying foul. In the early years of Joint-UCAS—the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency’s precursor to UCAS-D that also involved the U.S. Air Force—industry, the military and academic groups collaborated on what Darpa described as a “consortium-like” e ort to develop a “common operating system” (COS) for the drones. “The COS encompasses the software architecture, algorithms, applications and services that provide command and control, communications management, mission planning, much of the interactive autonomy, the human systems interface and many other qualities associated with the J-UCAS system,” according to a 2005 Darpa briefing. COS was canceled around the same time that the Air Force pulled out of J-UCAS and the program passed from Darpa to the Navy and became UCAS-D. The consortium arrangement saw Boeing and Northrop Grumman sharing software work. But since Boeing was seemingly way ahead in software, COS represented a “forced knowledge transfer to Northrop Grumman,” the insider claims. Parmenter downplays the importance of COS to the current program. “It was killed pretty early,” he says. But Boeing’s proprietary UCAS software, developed since the end of COS, is a hot property. In July, the company unveiled its so-called “Distributed Information-Centralized Decision” mission-control software for coordinating multiple drones, and flew three Scan Eagles on a single mission using the software. But the “X-45A did it many times with up to two real and two virtual vehicles,” the Boeing source says. Now the Navy reportedly wants to buy Boeing’s UCAS software for the X-47 program. At the same time, Northrop Grumman director of business development Rick Ludwig has said that the X-47 demonstration would indeed cost $1.2 billion if desirable options—like an air-refueling test—were included. The Navy’s software request and Northrop Grumman’s acknowledgment of the true potential cost of UCAS-D lit a fire in David Koopersmith, Boeing’s X-45 program manager, according to the Boeing source. He says the routine “loser debrief,” normally a sedate a air, turned ugly when Koopersmith accused the Navy of favoring Northrop Grumman and wrongly ordering the destruction of the X-45 airframes. There is speculation that Boeing might protest the UCAS decision on grounds that the Navy never wanted it to win. Ironically, internal reforms at Boeing contributed to its defeat in UCAS. Boeing has instituted policies and vetting procedures to encourage realistic bids. Industry under-bidding is widely considered a major factor in cost overruns in Pentagon development projects. I www.aviationweek.com/dti 28 DEFENSE TECHNOLOGY INTERNATIONAL OCTOBER 2007 http://www.aviationweek.com/dti
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