Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawk recently surpassed the 200,000-flight-hour mark. A majority of its hours came at the controls of the U.S. Air Force, with the remaining hours being logged by NASA, Germany and the Navy.




During its flights, Global Hawk routinely reaches 60,000 feet in the air for more than 30 hours at a time for a singular mission. Since its inception nearly a decade and a half ago, Global Hawk has had a variety of responsibilities, from providing assistance in emergency situations across the world to helping with the gathering of data and information to send to the military in communication and imagery collection efforts.




Through a press release published on July 26, Northrop Grumman executive Mick Jaggers had this to say about the milestone:




"Global Hawk has set endurance records and displayed an unmatched record of safety while reducing per hour flight costs to half the cost of the manned alternative," said Jaggers. "This milestone is especially meaningful as it comes just before the 15th anniversary of Global Hawk's first deployment into the theater of operations following the tragic events of 9/11. We expect Global Hawk to continue to provide indispensable ISR [intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance] information to our warfighters."

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