Officials of the Naval Air Systems Command at Patuxent River Naval Air Station, Md., announced an $8 million order Monday to Boeing Insitu Inc. in Bingen, Wash., for one full-rate-production lot-1 Blackjack UAS, which include air vehicles, ground control stations, launch-and-recovery equipment, and air vehicle support equipment kit.<\/p>\n
The Navy announced separate $70.1 million and $71.6 million orders last January and last June for a collective 12 new RQ-21A Blackjack small tactical UAVs for the Navy and Marine Corps.<\/p>\n
The Boeing Insitu RQ-21 is a twin-boom, single-engine, monoplane UAV for surveillance and reconnaissance. Users can launch and recover the reconnaissance drone on land or at sea without runways by using a pneumatic launcher and net-type recovery system.<\/p>\n
Related: Navy orders six RQ-21A UAV reconnaissance drones from Boeing Insitu in $70.1 million deal<\/p>\n
The 81-pound Blackjack is eight feet long with a 16-foot wingspan, and is designed to carry multi-sensor payloads in a large pod below its nose. The UAV can fly as quickly as 104 miles per hour, cruises at 63 miles per hour, can fly as long as 24 hours, and can fly as high as 19,500 feet. It is a version of the Insitu Integrator UAV.<\/p>\n
Users can customize the RQ-21A Blackjack’s multi-mission open-architecture payload bays with visible-light and infrared cameras, communications, and other tools to provide situational awareness information to warfighters on the forward edge of battle.<\/p>\n
The drone can integrate new payloads quickly, offers roll-on, roll-off capability to move the system quickly from ship to shore, as well as to and from cargo aircraft. The UAV can carry sensor payloads as heavy as 39 pounds.<\/p>\n
The Blackjack’s standard sensor payload consists of a visible-light imager, mid-wave infrared imager, laser rangefinder, infrared marker, communications, and automatic identification system.<\/p>\n
Related: Special Operations Command chooses Textron and Insitu to provide UAV surveillance to commando units<\/p>\n
The RQ-21A will provide persistent maritime and land-based tactical reconnaissance, surveillance, and target acquisition (RSTA) data collection and dissemination capabilities to sailors and Marines.<\/p>\n
For the Marine Corps it will provide the expeditionary force, divisions, and regiments with a dedicated intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) system that sends information to the tactical commander in real time.<\/p>\n
For the Navy the Blackjack will provide persistent RSTA information to Navy ships, Marine Corps land forces, Navy expeditionary combat command forces, and Navy special warfare units.<\/p>\n
On this order, Boeing Insitu will do the work in Bingen, Wash., and Hood River, Ore., and should be finished by January 2018. For more information contact Boeing Insitu online athttps:\/\/insitu.com, or Naval Air Systems Command at\u00a0www.navair.navy.mil. Full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" PATUXENT RIVER NAS, Md. \u2013 U.S. Navy unmanned aircraft experts are buying one additional RQ-21A Blackjack small tactical unmanned aerial system (UAS) to provide battlefield reconnaissance capability for U.S. Marine Corps field commanders.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":748,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":749,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions\/749"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoodtechvision.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}