The US Navy has made a significant step towards drones in carrier air wings

Now it just needs to get some drones

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A sophisticated drone winging over California while data-linked with a control station far away in Maryland has just laid the foundation for the US Navy’s future carrier air wings. It’s about time.
Navy leaders have said they want to transform the US fleet’s nine carrier air wings, which embark on the fleet’s 11 nuclear-powered supercarriers. Today there are no drones among the 60 or 70 aircraft – fighters, electronic-warfare planes, radar planes and helicopters – that normally populate a carrier air wing. 
The goal is for pilotless planes to eventually make up nearly two-thirds of each wing. 
The imperative is obvious. In general, an unmanned plane can fly farther than a manned plane can, and can fight without exposing a human pilot to danger. Drones might be the best way to address the extreme distances that would define any future war in the Pacific region.
Despite this, the tradition-bound Navy has moved slowly to integrate drones with its air wings. The US Air Force has been operating large, armed, fixed-wing drones since the early 2000s: propeller-driven Predators and Reapers and, soon, jet-propelled Collaborative Combat Aircraft “loyal wingmen”. 
By contrast, the Navy still doesn’t have an armed, fixed-wing drone – despite experiments dating back 20 years. Tests with the X-47B “Salty Dog” prototype proved that an unmanned jet with a fully stealthy design – that is, one without rudders – can land on a carrier, but the USN has resisted combatant drones. Instead the fleet’s first carrier drone, the MQ-25 Stingray, will be employed strictly as an aerial tanker when it first goes to sea in the coming few years. Its maker Boeing has stated that it could easily be equipped for other missions, however, and the fact that it is unmanned and stealthy might easily make it the real-world first choice for missions into dangerous airspace.
Wider changes should come in time, and the California-to-Maryland test has made them possible.
On November 5, California drone-maker General Atomics – the builder of the Predator, the Reaper and one of the initial loyal wingman models – launched one of its MQ-20 Avengers for a critical test flight. The Avenger is essentially a stealthier, jet-propelled version of the older turboprop Reaper, currently the mainstay of the Air Force’s armed drone force.
Working with plane-maker Lockheed Martin and the Navy, General Atomics connected the MQ-20 via satellite to an MD-5 drone control station at a naval air station in Maryland, more than 2,000 miles away. “The team not only executed airborne commands, but did so in a safe, controlled environment,” General Atomics president David Alexander said.
The MD-5 is basically an aircraft cockpit without the actual aircraft. A drone operator sitting in an MD-5 – which includes a seat, a control stick and various screens – can see what their drone sees and control it from anywhere in the world, as long as the radio link to the satellite and the drone is secure.
The great thing about the MD-5 is that it will connect to a wide array of drone types, not just the MQ-20. The Navy is installing MD-5 control stations aboard its supercarriers in order to support the MQ-25 drone tankers initially – but the stations are also compatible with any future naval versions of the Air Force’s speedy loyal wingman drones. The Avenger used in the recent test, in fact, is a candidate for that role.
With the MD-5s deep inside their hulls, the carriers will be ready for those majority-drone air wings the Navy is hoping for. It might take a while, of course: the fleet is already expecting its next main carrier fighter, the F/A-XX, to be a manned plane. The Air Force is now potentially going cold on its similar land-based fighter project, the Next Generation Air Dominance jet, and might even replace that with extra B-21 Raider stealth bombers, armed with air-to-air weapons and commanding squadrons of accompanying drones. The Navy’s F/A-XX might wind up being America’s only sixth-generation manned fighter.
Nonetheless the F/A-XX is being designed from the wheels up to fly and fight alongside armed drones. By the time the new manned fighter is ready, potentially some time in the 2030s, a naval version of the Air Force’s loyal wingman should be ready, too. 
There will probably be a transitional carrier air wing design, one that has drones but isn’t mostly drones, for years or even decades before the majority-drone air wing is possible. The drone crews for this interim wing will sit in MD-5 control stations. Thanks to that recent overland test, we can be confident the stations will work as intended. 
Now that it has the control stations, the Navy needs more drones to go with them.
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