The new long-range Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicle rolls out of its production plant in California. A development version of Global Hawk (RQ-4A) took off from Edwards AFB, in California on April 22 and had flown a 23-hour, 8,600-mile mission, nonstop and unrefueled over the Pacific Ocean, to Royal Australian Air Force Base at Edinburgh, Australia the next day.
Officials planned to acquire a total of 63 aircraft and 14 ground stations for mission launch, recovery, and control. They would all be dedicated to single missions, some having imagery intelligence capabilities and others having signals intelligence intercept equipment. The Global Hawk returned to the U.S. on June 8. While in the Pacific region, the drone completed 11 of 12 planned sorties in 238.5 flight hours, taking over 1,500 pictures. Though still under development, less than a month after 9/11, Global Hawk was deployed to the Gulf region to participate in Afghanistan operations. Within a decade, the Global Hawk fleet had conducted over 1,500 combat sorties.