A little under ninety minutes after the briefing had ended, the fully prepped General Atomics MQ-9 Reaper was towed by an army 4x4 utility vehicle out of its purpose-built beige-painted hangar, the structure bearing the legend ‘174th ATKW’ painted in black above the white doors. It was accompanied by two airmen walking beside its wings and carrying chocks that could be used to stop the drone if required, and which would be used to keep it stationary on a hardstanding while the pre-start and other checks were carried out before it taxied for take-off.
All the underwing weapons pylons were occupied, carrying the maximum load of four AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, two 500-pound GBU-12 Paveway II laser-guided bombs and one 500-pound GBU-38 JDAM – Joint Direct Attack Munition – precision-guided bomb. The missile’s ‘AGM’ designation simply meant ‘air-to-ground missile’ while ‘GBU’ stood for ‘guided bomb unit’.
That particular Reaper was, as American pilots are so fond of saying, ‘loaded for bear’.
On the hardstanding, with the two main wheels chocked and the brakes engaged, the engine was started and the various systems, like the rotatable camera mounted under the Reaper’s nose, were tested to ensure they were in correct working order. The power lead and telemetry lead were unplugged, the final safety pin, marked by a prominent red flag, was removed, and the drone was ready to taxi.
As the Reaper headed towards the runway, just as on a conventional aircraft a series of pre-take-off checks were carried out to ensure that it was in a flyable condition, the most visually obvious of which was a test of the brakes, the nose of the drone dipping as Nagell applied them. Then the UAV proceeded steadily to the threshold of the active runway. Once the local controller was certain that the runway was clear of turbulence – wide-body passenger jets, in particular, create vortices on landing that are powerful enough to flip a light aircraft onto its back – take-off clearance was granted. The drone accelerated down the runway, lifting off at what was obviously a much slower speed than the passenger jets that had preceded it, and after a much shorter take-off run, thanks to its light weight and straight, glider-like wings.
Until 2019, all Reapers launching from Syracuse Hancock International Airport were required to be escorted by a piloted aircraft to ensure separation from other air traffic, the concern being that the comparatively small UAVs would be difficult for commercial pilots to see and avoid. The rule was that a Civil Air Patrol jet would follow the Reaper from the airfield up to a height of 18,000 feet and act as the eyes and ears of the UAV pilot on the ground. This system also meant that the Reapers were not permitted to fly in marginal weather conditions, because it would not be possible for the pilot of the chase plane to reliably maintain visual contact with the drone.
All that changed in 2019 when a company based in Cicero, just outside Syracuse, developed a ground-based radar known as LSTAR that could accurately detect all aircraft, including drones, and determine a contact’s altitude even if it didn’t have a functioning transponder. The new radar had been created for an entirely different purpose – to detect and track incoming mortar rounds as fast as possible in a battle situation to allow retaliatory fire – but despite its comparatively short range it had proved to be capable of monitoring air traffic around Syracuse both accurately and reliably.
In the thirty-foot-long air-conditioned ground control station, No Sweat Nagell sat in a comfortable chair that looked more like the kind of seat to be found in an upmarket airport lounge than in a military establishment, but with Predator and Reaper drones routinely able to remain aloft for twenty-four hours, and with even longer duration UAVs on the drawing board, the comfort of the remote pilot was a paramount consideration.
In front of him was a control panel, the most important element of which was a fairly standard flight stick, a multipurpose vertical lever that could control most aspects of the Reaper’s flight path. The pilot would use that just as if he were sitting in the cockpit of a conventional aircraft, the main difference being that the inputs he made were transmitted to the UAV initially using a C-band line-of-sight data link. The other difference was that all the pilot had to rely on, his eyes, as it were, were the video screens in front of him that displayed the feeds from the Reaper’s on-board radars and cameras and provided a limited view of what was in front of the UAV. This was nothing like the all-round vision experienced by a pilot flying any kind of an aircraft, hence the ‘looking through a straw’ analogy.
Once the drone moved outside line-of-sight range, as was the case when the pilot was sitting in a GCS in Montana or Nevada or somewhere, but the Reaper was taking off from an airfield near Mosul or Kabul, almost literally on the other side of the world, the routine was somewhat different in that a local pilot would handle the taxiing, take-off and initial climb out of the vehicle and then hand over control to the remote pilot once the drone had reached a safe altitude. Control from then on, until the mission had been completed and the drone was returning to its base, would be handled via a Ku-band L-3 Com satellite data link system. Recovery was the reverse of take-off, the local pilot again taking control as the drone approached its home airfield and then handling the landing and taxiing to its hangar or shelter.
For this flight, Nagell would be both the local pilot and the remote pilot and would be using both the line of sight and satellite communication systems to control the drone at different stages and locations. He levelled the Reaper at 30,500 feet, adjusted the speed and heading and then relaxed as the drone continued on its planned track towards the southern shore of Lake Ontario. The on-board radar showed no contacts close enough to be a problem and even the limited view through the cameras confirmed that it was a lovely day out there.
With a bit of luck, Nagell thought, the weather might hold until he could hand over to the second pilot in a few hours and head off home to enjoy what was left of Independence Day.