The unmanned Global Hawk air vehicle known as AV3 (or TV3 for “Test Vehicle 3”) came home to a hero’s welcome on Monday, February 20, after serving in Afghanistan and Iraq. AV3 was greeted at Edwards AFB with a traditional ‘hosing down” by two base fire trucks - an aviation tradition reserved for last flights and special occasions. In this case, the special occasion was AV3’s retirement from combat and possibly from flight.

Designed as a flight test vehicle, AV3 was built to make about forty test flights a year for a few years. It was never intended for active service. But when the attacks of September 11, 2001 came, the need for Global Hawk became urgent and immediate. Three Global Hawks were rushed from flight test and sent to Southwest Asia. One of those, AV4, crashed in 2001 - the result of its hasty deployment. The same fate met AV5 in 2002. AV3 was left alone to handle the mission load. Handle the load it did. AV3 was over Tora Bora when the coalition attacked. It was over Baghdad picking out targets and monitoring the Republican Guard even before the shooting began. When media reported that a sandstorm blinded troops on both sides of the battlefield in March of 2003, the truth was that Global Hawk AV3 watched from above giving US commanders an eye trough the storm. Instead of forty test missions a year with maintenance in between, it racked up forty tough missions in a row without a serious maintenance or system squawk. AV3’s performance in battle was outstanding for a production airplane; for a test vehicle it was remarkable. AV3 didn’t let active duty keep it from performing important test flights. When it wasn’t watching over troops in Southwest Asia, it was busy at its original job of providing test data to the Global Hawk program. Unlike the Predator and some other UAVs, Global Hawk is not flown by a pilot on the ground. It flies itself, operating autonomously from take off to landing. A human monitors the flight from the ground and can give the aircraft commands such as “fly to a new waypoint” or “circle here”, but the aircraft operates its own flight controls and flies itself.

On Sunday, February 19, 2006, AV3 was programmed to fly from Australia to Edwards AFB in California. The long flight would not arrive in California until Monday. To quote Maj General Curtis Bedke explaining Global Hawks autonomous flight system to a crowd at Edwards who had assembled to watch it arrive, “It knows where Edwards is, it knows where the runway is, it knows where the centerline is, and it will land closer to the centerline than most pilots”. It did. And so after at least 167 missions and roughly 5000 flying hours, AV3 came home. It’s sides plastered with mission markings – a testament to the history this aircraft has made. Two new production aircraft are now on station in the war zone. They will carry on the mission, as will the Global Hawk program for years to come.