MoD scraps £227m Phoenix spy drone

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MoD scraps £227m Phoenix spy drone that hated heat and landed upside-down
Michael Evans, Defence Editor

As a spy drone, it had its disadvantages. To land, it had to flip on its back. It could not operate in extreme heat or in thin air and became known as the “bugger off” because it frequently did, never to return.

The Phoenix unmanned air vehicle, which cost an estimated £300,000 each and was brought into service with the British Army in 1998 after a protracted development programme, is now officially dead.

MPs on the Commons Defence Committee revealed in a report published last week that the Phoenix, which provided target information for the Army's artillery regiments from an operating height of about 9,000ft, was unable to cope with the heat in Iraq when it was deployed in 2003. It had to be used only in the cooler months. The Ministry of Defence also confirmed that it was never sent to Afghanistan because the air was too thin there.

The Phoenix has now been taken out of service and replaced by a more sophisticated aerial spy platform called Hermes 450. The MPs said that the Hermes had to be acquired as a “stop-gap” filler because the Phoenix “could not be operated effectively in a hot and high climate”.

The rise and fall of the Phoenix has been one of the more quixotic stories in the history of MoD equipment purchases. The total cost of the programme was £227 million. The development took so long and involved so many technical hitches that there were some moves to abandon it.

The biggest problem was landing. The surveillance pod was slung under its belly, so the spy drone had to flip on to its back to avoid damaging the equipment on landing. But too many crash-landed and bits fell off.

The answer, the technical wizards decided, was to fit an airbag on the top of the fuselage to cushion the impact after the flipover process had been completed. The solution worked but the Phoenix began to look like a Heath Robinson contraption, and its reputation as a reliable enemy gun spotter took a hammering when many of them were “lost”, either having been shot down by sharpshooters as they buzzed noisily overhead like a model airplane or having taken off and failed to come back.

Phoenix's first operational tour was in Kosovo in 1999 when Nato took on the Serbs to protect the province's Albanian majority. Initially there were problems with its satellite link, which prevented real-time pictures from reaching the Royal Artillery's ground station. Eventually, though, it proved that it could work. Ten Phoenixes, however, were lost or destroyed in Kosovo in 1999 and three more were lost during operations the following year.

An MoD spokeswoman said that the Phoenix was used in Iraq, “but it was designed for the Cold War to operate in the temperate conditions of the north German plain - it had difficulty operating in hotter temperatures. She added: “It was used for a time in the cooler months in Iraq but withdrawn over the summer as it could not cope with 50C [122F] temperatures. It was not designed for extreme heat or for the thinner air of higher altitudes.”

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/p ... 510403.ece