The Air National Guard 174th Attack Wing's recent demonstration of a host of new MQ-9 capabilities within the Ghost Reaper suite is one leg of a synchronized push to "create an aircraft that is far more capable than any one service or organization could make on its own," the wing's chief of weapons and tactics told Inside Defense this week. The wing's contribution includes the flight of three pods as part of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command's Northern Edge Exercise at Eielson Air Force Base, AK, earlier this summer, during which one of them - the Centerline Avionics Bay Pod - showed it "could prove to be the single most transformative upgrade to MQ-9 capabilities ever," Maj. Drew Larned wrote in an email today. Lamed said General Atomics' pod, which hosted SRC's Agile Condor high-performance embedded computing architecture and ran the Joint Artificial Intelligence Center's Smart Sensor program during the May exercise, "performed exceptionally well."
展开▼
