GA-ASI MQ-9 Reaper

Scott Kenny said:
So what?

It's about like saying they managed to shoot down a target drone... Reapers don't have any defensive systems like chaff, flares, decoys, RWRs, MAWS, etc installed.
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Seems odd to me that they are not flying with the Self-Protection pod that GA demonstrated years ago.
 
It´s better they spend their missiles on Reapers and Predators than on airliners.
If the Reaper were too much protected, this would not work.
 
TomcatViP said:
It´s better they spend their missiles on Reapers and Predators than on airliners.
If the Reaper were too much protected, this would not work.
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Granted, I'm just getting annoyed by the propaganda claims of "we shot down a US plane!!!eleventyone!" Needs the DOD to drop the James May "Oh, no, how sad. Anyway..." meme in response. Every time.
 
TomcatViP said:
It´s better they spend their missiles on Reapers and Predators than on airliners.
If the Reaper were too much protected, this would not work.
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I just had a look on FR24 and the only airliners flying over Yemen right now are Yemenia flights from Dubai and Cairo. No other operator is crazy enough to route over Yemen; they're staying well offshore through the Gulf of Aden or in Saudi airspace.
 
Scott Kenny said:
So what?

It's about like saying they managed to shoot down a target drone... Reapers don't have any defensive systems like chaff, flares, decoys, RWRs, MAWS, etc installed.
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Well, it's one hell of a target drone. Some modern multirole fighters cost about as much.
Scott Kenny said:
Agreed, but we all know that the DoD makes some absolutely WTF-inspiring decisions.
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Iirc they're working to add a podded self-defense suit to them, but it's only in future.
 
TomS said:
I just had a look on FR24 and the only airliners flying over Yemen right now are Yemenia flights from Dubai and Cairo. No other operator is crazy enough to route over Yemen; they're staying well offshore through the Gulf of Aden or in Saudi airspace.
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Really? Was that the sense of my meaning? Is that what you can only see out of the Houthis actions?
C'mon, I know you know better.
 
TomS said:
I just had a look on FR24 and the only airliners flying over Yemen right now are Yemenia flights from Dubai and Cairo. No other operator is crazy enough to route over Yemen; they're staying well offshore through the Gulf of Aden or in Saudi airspace.
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Well they're targeting civilian vessels, so there's no reason they wouldn't target air traffic too.
 
TomcatViP said:
Really? Was that the sense of my meaning? Is that what you can only see out of the Houthis actions?
C'mon, I know you know better.
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I understood you to mean that if we don't give the Houthis drones to shoot at, they would shoot at airliners instead. My point is that there are no foreign airliners flying over Yemen for them to shoot at.
 
www.twz.com

MQ-9 Reapers Gathered In Florida, Simulated Fighting Over South China Sea

The recent Reaper Smoke competition included a scenario based on a simulated mission over Mischief Reef, a key flashpoint in the highly strategic region. The recent Reaper Smoke competition included a scenario based on a simulated mission over Mischief Reef, a key flashpoint in the highly...
www.twz.com www.twz.com
 
Scott Kenny said:
Yes, if you don't mind datalinking the radar down to a control center on the ship it's an improvement over the Merlins. Much longer loiter time, higher altitude so you get more warning time.
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Available onboard power will be miserable, though
 
MQ-9B AEW&C：

The Expanding Market for AEW&C Solutions

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and heightened tensions along NATO’s eastern flank, coupled with multi-domain operations in the Indo-Pacific Region, have placed considerable pressure on NATO members’ ageing fleets of manned Airborne Early Warning & Control (AEW&C) aircraft.
euro-sd.com euro-sd.com

The MQ-9B SkyGuardian/SeaGuardian unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is a potential candidate to conduct persistent wide-area surveillance/airborne early warning (AEW) from land and aircraft carriers, in the latter thanks to proof-of-concept demonstrations to be conducted starting from this autumn in the US. General Atomics has conducted concept development and engineering studies to see if the MQ-9B could conduct different demanding operations including AEW missions supported by a radar manufacturer. During the Combined Naval Event 2023 conference at Farnborough in the UK, General Atomics showed an MQ-9B-based AEW&C solution with IFF and BMC2 capabilities. This configuration of the MQ-9B platform was equipped with a dual-pod radar solution, with each underwing pod accommodating a radar antenna. The platform also featured a central conformal pod hosting the processing and cooling capabilities.
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WarValor said:
We really should add countermeasures to drones…
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www.ga-asi.com

Self-Protection Pod

www.ga-asi.com

www.aviationtoday.com

MQ-9A Block 5 to Get New Self-Protection Pod Next Year - May 9 - Avionics International

Next year, the Block 5 Extended Range version of the General Atomics Aeronautical Systems, Inc. (GA-ASI) MQ-9A Reaper drone is to receive a self-protection pod developed by GA-ASI in concert […]
www.aviationtoday.com www.aviationtoday.com

860x394.jpg
 
Scott Kenny said:
Yeah, and it only took until 2026 to get those deployed. 25 years after the Reaper first flew!
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Was there a need 25 years ago? How many Reapers have been targeted and shot down in combat, maybe 10 or 15 and all within the last 5 years. Adding chaff, flares, RWR, MAWS etc would have just added unnecessary weight, impacting payload or persistence, for the 99.9% of missions the Reaper has flown where it would not be necessary.

This capability is taking the Reaper far beyond what is was ever meant to do. A better option would have been to design, develop, deliver and field a replacement solution that was designed from day one to operate in non permissive environments.
 
Ozair said:
Was there a need 25 years ago? How many Reapers have been targeted and shot down in combat, maybe 10 or 15 and all within the last 5 years. Adding chaff, flares, RWR, MAWS etc would have just added unnecessary weight, impacting payload or persistence, for the 99.9% of missions the Reaper has flown where it would not be necessary.

This capability is taking the Reaper far beyond what is was ever meant to do. A better option would have been to design, develop, deliver and field a replacement solution that was designed from day one to operate in non permissive environments.
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This gives us a capability to do that now, while the non-permissive Reaper gets designed.
 
Scott Kenny said:
This gives us a capability to do that now, while the non-permissive Reaper gets designed.
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Not really, this is lipstick on a pig. Popping chaff and flares to decoy modern missiles from a drone that essentially cannot turn, outrun or change altitude in any meaningful way is likely a waste of time.
 
Ozair said:
Not really, this is lipstick on a pig. Popping chaff and flares to decoy modern missiles from a drone that essentially cannot turn, outrun or change altitude in any meaningful way is likely a waste of time.
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Key word there is likely.

What is more useful is the MAWS and RWR, since that will tell you that whoever you're flying Reapers over now has AA radars and/or Guns, SAMs and MANPADS. I suspect that the chaff+flare launchers were little more than a case of "hey, if we stretch this pod 30cm and add 100lbs more possible weight we can stick some chaff and flares in there as well as the rest of the sensors."

And having chaff/flares available may keep someone from blowing up your ~$5mil ~$11mil drone.

Edit: Was given some updated prices.
 
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I’m going to address some of the comments here about timeline and why it takes years to field something “as simple as” a chaff/flare dispenser based on my background with store separation work.

The Self Protection Pod (SPP) was first demonstrated on an MQ-9 4 years ago. At the very minimum, with a program that is willing to be cheap and is willing to take a lot of risk (up to and including a hull lost) during the test phase, engineering work started at least a year before the demo and very likely at least 2-3 years before that demo.

From a conceptual level I don’t think a vanilla MQ-9A doesn’t have any RWR or IR gear to detect that someone have launched a missile at it. The pilot and sensor operator’s view of the world is through the nose camera and the MTS-B sensor ball. The field of view of those things is like looking around your surroundings through a soda straw. So the Situational awareness for an MQ9 pilot and sensor operator is actually pretty poor. So for chaff and flare dispenser to be effective you also need a sensor system to be able to detect that the aircraft is under threat, reject false positives and employ the chaff/flare/decoys in an effective manner. So before any engineering analysis is done for the integration, someone probably did analysis work to figure out the sensor suites needed and whether or not something like a SPP is even worth doing; this alone probably took at least 6months to do if not more. Since the SPP is operational now, somebody somewhere did the analysis work to prove that it can be effective and useful to employ. This type of information is very likely not available on the internet and is probably classified because it becomes part of the training, practice, and procedure of how best to employ an SPP effectively.

So your operational analysis guys comes back and say that a SPP should work and is worth doing; now comes all the engineering work required to actually integrate the SPP. From an aerodynamics perspective, it is critical to know that the addition of the pod will not severely affect the flying qualities of the aircraft. The pod is basically adding a big ventral tail to the aircraft, at worst this can destabilize the aircraft in yaw and at best it reduce the amount of control power available to the rudder due to both interference effects and increasing the yaw stiffness of the aircraft. So if the addition of the pod reduces the cross wind landing allowance for the aircraft the pilot needs to know. To get the aerodynamic data you traditionally need to run a bunch of wind tunnel test to get the aero deltas. Wind tunnel test are planned out 6months+ in advance at minimum and there is at least a good month or so of post wind tunnel work to build up the aerodynamic deltas tables from the wind tunnel data. The SPP is simple enough that you can probably get away with doing only CFD to get the aero-deltas which might shorten the amount of time you need to get the aero deltas from 8-9 months down to 3 depending on HPC resources available and how much of a reduced data set you are willing to accept. Again SPP seems aerodynamically simple enough that you can get away with a small data set and only do CFD simulation.

This is just the effort the quantify the effects of the pod on the flying qualities of the MQ9. The biggest challenge is the store separation analysis you need to do for the chaff and flares coming out of this pod. The MQ-9 is a pusher, so there is a real danger that the dispenser doesn’t eject a chaff or flare far enough and have it end up striking the propeller. A lot of engineering hours is needed to predict the families of trajectories the chaff and flares will take and these trajectories is needed to be predicted at varying speed, altitudes unsteady effects such as gust. To get these trajectories, you traditionally need a lot of wind tunnel time to characterize the aerodynamics of the chaff bundles and flares and to collect aero interference data for when these things are close to the pod and aircraft. Again the work here might be done with CFD here given the relatively simple geometry of a chaff bundles or flare. Even still this will be a few months of CFD simulation alone, and you still need engineering hours to convert the raw CFD data to build the aero models and run tools to simulate the tens of thousands of trajectories to prove that a prop strike is either impossible or extremely unlikely event when deployed within the launch envelopes. You will beed the trajectory data from the store sep analysis to clear the pod for a flight test.

You were probably planning for the flight test in parallel with all the flying qualities and safe separation analysis. Even after you make it to the flight test, your first set of flights will mostly be done to validate the flying qualities changes to the aircraft so you don’t even deploy any chaff or flare. For the first test where you do deploy chaff and flare, you are probably doing it at the heart of the deployment envelope where the likelihood of a mishap is the least. This is probably the test event linked at the beginning of my post from about 4 years ago. You will probably need several flights to expand that deployment envelope out to the edges of the design intent deployment envelopes. These are functional tests to make sure that the SPP can detect threats and employ chaff and flares safely. Once this is done you will need to do operational testing where the SPP is sent to test squadrons where they actually get employed in an exercise or wargame to validate the operational analysis done at the beginning of the program and to resolve any issues that needs to be resolve at the operational level. This is at least if not more than a year of testing.

This is why even though SPP first deployed flares in late 2020 the SPP is only getting fielded now in 2025; and that a lot of engineering work on the SPP was probably done a few years ahead of even the 2020 test. The SPP looks like a pretty simple pod and the chaff and flares it dispenses are pretty simple and light weight. Overall the SPP program is probably a relatively low risk program that can rely more on simulation to generate the aerodynamic data needed to clear and integrate this pod for operations; and it still took the better part of a decade to get it operational. For anything more complex than this, it becomes harder to avoid wind tunnel time and there will be more conditions that you need to analyze to make sure that your store safely separates and that it is effective. This is why weapons development and integration is extremely expensive and time intensive to do.
 
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Scott Kenny said:
You do know that $30mil is the price per system, not per drone, right?

A single Reaper "system" is 4 reapers plus control station.
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Nope, it's exactly "plane".
System is 100ish domestic, and can skyrocket for FMCs(100+ plane for guardians).
 
WarValor said:
Aye Scott, I found this.

[...]​

  • Unit Cost (FY21 $): $56.5 million (includes four aircraft with sensors, ground control station and Predator Primary satellite link)
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Ah, thanks.

Which still puts them a lot less than $30 mil per bird. Possibly as high as $12mil each, but Reapers use the same control station as the basic Predator. Last I parted that out, the GCS (+uplink) was about $12mil. So call it ~$11mil per bird.
 
Ainen said:
Nope, it's exactly "plane".
System is 100ish domestic, and can skyrocket for FMCs(100+ plane for guardians).
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www.af.mil

MQ-9 Reaper

The MQ-9 Reaper is employed primarily as an intelligence-collection asset and secondarily against dynamic execution targets.
www.af.mil

Unit Cost: $56.5 million (includes four aircraft with sensors, ground control station and Predator Primary satellite link)
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Forest Green said:
www.af.mil

MQ-9 Reaper

The MQ-9 Reaper is employed primarily as an intelligence-collection asset and secondarily against dynamic execution targets.
www.af.mil
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I think this is price from over a decade ago, when it was 10ish/drone or something.
30 itself isn't fresh, given the ongoing inflation.
Even comparable aircraft from other nations (say, Akinci) come more expensive than the listed price.
 

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Ainen said:
I think this is price from over a decade ago, when it was 10ish/drone or something.
30 itself isn't fresh, given the ongoing inflation.
Even comparable aircraft from other nations (say, Akinci) come more expensive than the listed price.
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The price hasn't really changed much as WarValor indicated, it's old technology now. The prices you're looking at are likely for more than one drone, even says so:

FY 2021 Program: Funds the continued development, testing, and integration of SOF-peculiaremerging technology mission kits, weapons, and modifications on platforms, Ground ControlStations, and training systems. Request also funds support equipment, primary satellite linkequipment, and production shutdown
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Ainen said:
I think this is price from over a decade ago, when it was 10ish/drone or something.
30 itself isn't fresh, given the ongoing inflation.
Even comparable aircraft from other nations (say, Akinci) come more expensive than the listed price.
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That price, for FOUR birds, is in 2021 dollars.
 
Scott Kenny said:
Key word there is likely.

What is more useful is the MAWS and RWR, since that will tell you that whoever you're flying Reapers over now has AA radars and/or Guns, SAMs and MANPADS.
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Losing the drone is preferable to spending money on survivability tbh. Drones are related to munitions and should be treated as rounds of ammunition for mission planning.

The only problem is that Americans, and perhaps just Americans, have trouble making distinctions between mission planning and readiness training. Drones being treated as ammunition for mission planning means they get zero maintenance and crash, like DASH. Drones being treated as needing maintenance means they get survivability pods, which doubles the price of the drone, like Reaper.
 

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