Ventral Fairing Circled on a HADES Jet
What This Image Shows
A composite graphic. The upper left carries The War Zone headline "Army Wants To Test Air-Launched Drones From A Global Express Business Jet" with the standfirst about trials tallying "with previous comments about launching the drones from the" HADES jet, bylined THOMAS NEWDICK. The rest of the frame is a large photograph of a military-modified Bombardier Global Express in flight against an overcast sky, with a red circle drawn around a fairing on the underside of the rear fuselage.
The circle is the argument. Whoever made the graphic is pointing at a ventral modification and asking whether that is where drones would exit. The filename this image was filed under reads it as a drone exit hatch, which is the poster's interpretation rather than an identification from any published diagram.
What can be said carefully: aircraft in this program carry belly-mounted sensor fairings for the surveillance mission, and a fairing visible in a photograph is not evidence of a launch tube. @tjphager has argued specifically that the airframe was never built out to launch drones, which is the countervailing view worth holding while looking at this image.
See N1098L Air-Launched Drones, the operator research in Nwq, and N1098L Spy Plane.
Related Areas
- Cluster: Aircraft and Flight Evidence
- Section: Planes
- All photo evidence: Photos