Last fall, when Boeing's bid to build the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter flamed out and the US$200 billion winner-take-all contract to supply up to 3,000 planes went to its rival, Lockheed Martin, a good part of Boeing's plans went up in smoke.
Designed for the Air Force, the Navy and the Marines, the F-35 will be the last new manned American fighter for decades to come.
But, as things turned out, Boeing's warplane operations were set back only momentarily. The company is moving on to the next generation of combat planes: robotic, pilotless aircraft.
Early this summer, the first test flight of Boeing's X-45 strike aircraft, with no pilot aboard, will take to the skies over Southern California. Far more sophisticated than the Predator surveillance planes flying over Afghanistan, the X-45 is being designed as a full-fledged attack plane. When called to duty, swarms of them would strike deep into enemy territory to knock out anti-aircraft sensors and missile batteries. The highly risky mission would clear a path for aircraft with pilots, saving them from danger.
If the X-45 works -- and it will take six years to find out -- there is no reason that it could not do the work of other manned-fighter missions, taking some of those 3,000 orders away from Lockheed Martin. The X-45 is a lot cheaper: Boeing is aiming to build and operate the robot fighter at one-third the cost of the F-35.
While pilotless aircraft are not new, the idea that a robot plane could replace an Air Force fighter pilot was, until recently, the stuff of futurist science magazines.
"Five years ago, people said it was ridiculous," said Michael Heinz, who heads Boeing's Unmanned Systems unit, created last November. But rapid advances in computer and communications technology, combined with the success of the Predator surveillance aircraft in Afghanistan, have turned battlefield commanders into true believers. In the process, a significant new market is being created within the military industry.
Frost & Sullivan, a research group in San Antonio, forecasts that the market for UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, will be worth nearly US$5 billion by 2005. Heinz and other executives at military contractors see an annual market of at least US$10 billion by decade's end, with growth continuing at double-digit rates for a decade or more.
No one expects robotic aircraft to make up for Boeing's woes in the commercial aircraft business or for immediate cutbacks threatened for the F/A-18 Hornet for the Navy. Still, Heinz sees the UAV program as potentially huge: "What defines a huge business for Boeing? We're a US$58 billion business. A billion in revenue qualifies."
But Heinz wants a lot more than that. A Pentagon planning document called Joint Vision 2020 forecasts that one-third of the military's combat planes by that year will be robotic.
Military contractors also have their eyes on civil and commercial markets. If the Federal Aviation Administration certifies the plane -- a lengthy process, with no sure results -- contractors envision UAVs monitoring the skies of America in the name of domestic security.
Robopilot
Aviation consultants say they cannot imagine the government or the public accepting pilotless commercial airline travel -- even though computers have taken over large pieces of commercial pilots' tasks. But robotic planes are becoming progressively better at takeoff and landing, and the idea of pilotless FedEx and UPS transoceanic flights is technically plausible by the end of the decade.
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