Aquila UAV
The Army's first major UAV acquisition effort was the Aquila program. This program started in 1979 and was originally estimated to cost $123 million for a 43-month development effort, followed by planned expenditures of $440 million for procurement of 780 air vehicles and associated equipment. By the time the Army abandoned the program in 1987 due to cost, schedule, and technical difficulties, Aquila had cost over $1 billion, and future procurement costs were expected to have been an additional $1.1 billion for 376 aircraft.
The original mission for Aquila was to have been relatively straightforward: it was to be a small, propeller-driven aircraft (portable by four soldiers) that could provide ground commanders with real-time battlefield information about enemy forces located beyond the line of sight of ground observers. As development was nearing completion, it became evident that the requirement for the small aircraft size conflicted with the many avionics and payload-related items the Army wanted to put inside the UAV.
Aquila was expected to fly by autopilot, carry sensors to locate and identify enemy point targets in day or night, use a laser to designate the targets for the Copperhead artillery projectile, provide conventional artillery adjustment, and survive against Soviet air defenses. Achieving the latter expectation required development of a jam-resistant, secure communications link, but using the secure link degraded the video quality, which interfered with the ability to do targeting. During operational testing in 1987, Aquila was only able to successfully meet mission requirements on 7 of 105 flights.
