Senators want USAF to use retired Global Hawks for hypersonic testing

摘要

Senate appropriators aren't looking to stand in the way of the Air Force's planned divestment of a portion of its Global Hawk fleet, though they're hoping the service will direct some of the aircraft toward ongoing hypersonic flight-testing efforts. Lawmakers in the report accompanying the Senate Appropriations Committee's mark of the fiscal year 2022 spending bill, released Monday, wrote that they supported the Air Force's plan to retire the Block 20 and Block 30 RQ-4s, leaving the Block 40 airframes for high-altitude intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance missions. Still, senators pushed the service to transition some of the planned retirements to the Defense Department's Test Resource Management Center to aid in officials' work on SkyRange. The effort leverages high-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles to bolster or replace the ships used for hypersonic flight testing and other traditional data collection assets, according to an Arnold Engineering Development Complex press release from last fall.