The Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle has surpassed the 10,000 hour flying mark, clocking 10,500 hours as of late July—some 63 percent of them on combat missions. Making this accomplishment more outstanding is the fact that, until earlier this year when the first production models arrived in Southwest Asia, the Air Force had been flying development models in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Today’s armament maintainers are tasked with performing flightline (O-Level) maintenance with an assortment of legacy test sets that greatly limit the ability to quickly and efficiently verify armament system readiness, diagnose failures, and ultimately return the aircraft to full mission...