Move over, Buck Rogers

X-45 is showing it has the mettle to fly toughest missions

BY WILLIAM A. BARKSDALE

The night is eerily calm, the darkness foreboding. A U.S. pilot pulls on a G-suit and helmet and climbs into an aircraft not knowing what the future holds. As the jet climbs over the desert skies, adrenaline is pumping because this is for real.

The highly trained airman has entered another world, one where thousands of lights dart up from the ground with no warning, each one seemingly aimed his way. This would be the greatest fireworks show ever witnessed if it were not deadly. It's no game. It's warfare, it's dangerous, and there's nowhere to hide.

Known as Suppression of Enemy Air Defense, the mission is simple. Fly into harm's way and become human bait, a target for air defenses. Once the ground missile site turns on its radar and prepares to launch a strike, the chaos begins. If the threat can't be destroyed, other pilots will die.

SEAD takes a unique breed, a special type of warrior--and Dick Ewers fits that description. As a U.S. Marine Corps aviator in Vietnam, he flew the mission in his F-4 Phantom and still remembers it well.

"When you fly SEAD, you're the first guy in and you're getting shot at. I'd say 90 to 95 percent of the airplanes we lost were due to a ground threat," Ewers said. "SEAD was and is a very lethal mission in which you can lose a lot of people if you don't plan it right. It's not something you want to do without a lot of friends helping you."

Retired from the Marine Corps since 1989, Ewers now works as a NASA research pilot at Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base, Calif. One of his assignments is to "fly chase" on an advanced experimental aircraft known as the X-45, and it takes him right back to some very harrowing moments in Southeast Asia.

"When I was in Vietnam, I lost three of my closest squadron mates due to enemy ground fire," recalled the fighter pilot. "If we'd had an unmanned combat vehicle like the X-45 flying then, a lot of pilots might have been saved."

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As the first unmanned air vehicle designed specifically for SEAD, and with the potential to deliver a revolutionary improvement in effectiveness, the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System X-45 is being watched closely by many in the defense industry.

The X-45 is a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy, and Boeing Integrated Defense Systems program that also involves NASA. Boeing developed and built two X-45A demonstrators and is working on an X-45C demonstrator. The program's purpose is to demonstrate the technical feasibility, military utility and operational value of an unmanned combat air system for the military.

"This is a revolutionary aircraft because it is designed to think and act like aviators do without having an aviator control it," said U.S. Air Force Lt. Col. James "Pee Wee" Wertz, 452nd Flight Test Squadron commander and Global Vigilance Combined Test Force director at Edwards. "No one has to move a stick and throttle to tell this airplane what to do. As a matter of fact, its auto