Lockheed to focus on unmanned aircraft

[n_kitson]

From today's WSJ:<br />(sorry for the cut-and-paste, but this is a good article, the detail is interesting, and many on this board don't have a WSJ subscription)<br /><br /><b><font color="yellow">One Small Step for Drones<br /><br />Legendary 'Skunk Works' Helps Lockheed Martin Jump Into Unmanned-Plane Market </font></b><br />By JONATHAN KARP, Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL<br />February 7, 2006; Page B1<br /><br />PALMDALE, Calif. -- For decades, Lockheed Martin Corp. has pioneered innovative warplanes -- the kind that take pilots higher, faster and more stealthily into enemy airspace. Now, the defense giant is diving into a sizzling market that it previously ceded to rivals, one that will keep pilots on the ground.<br /><br />As unmanned aircraft prove to be essential to modern warfare in Iraq and elsewhere, Lockheed is shedding its ambivalence and busily developing concepts for newfangled drones. One drone would be launched from, and retrieved by, submarines; another would fly at nine times the speed of sound. A third, which is off the drawing board but not quite airborne, has wings designed to fold in flight so that it could rapidly turn from slow-speed spy plane to quick-strike bomber.<br /><br />Lockheed is drawing its drones from the same well that produced its stealth fighters: the company's secretive Skunk Works unit. And the unmanned craft are just as radical as some of the unit's past creations. "You have to throw out conventional aerodynamics," Skunk Works head Frank Cappuccio says of the so-called morphing drone, with the folding wings.<br /><br /> <br />As it pursues cutting-edge technologies, Lockheed -- maker of the world's costliest fighter plane, the F-22 -- also wants to throw out conventional economics. The drone ideas it has disclosed are relatively inexpensive, more in the spirit of trailblazing models made in Israel than the $57 million Global Hawk unmanned spy jet made by Northrop Grumman Corp. at the same Mojave Desert airfield where the Skunk Works sits