Displayed - 9 February 2012

Wingspan: 116.2 ft · Length: 44.4 ft
Speed: 400 mph · Range: 1,300+ miles
Ceiling: 65,000 ft · Cost: $35 million

Northrup Grumman developed the RQ-4 Global Hawk in response to a Department of Defense requirement for a high-altitude long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft. Aptly named, the Global Hawk could deploy to any point on the globe and then loiter, as a hawk, for as long as 24 hours at up to 65,000 feet while monitoring an area as large as 40,000 square miles.

The first flight of the RQ-4 took place in 1998, with delivery of the first pre-production vehicles to the [U.S.] Air Force five years later. Goodfellow's Global Hawk (S/N 02-2013) was part of Block 10, the first production block, and was accepted into the inventory in 2006. During the next four years it flew 285 missions, mainly in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, before retiring to Goodfellow in 2011 as the first Global Hawk to be placed on outdoor display. That was fitting, since it is Goodfellow that trains the geospatial intelligence analysts responsible for exploiting imagery produced by such platforms as the Global Hawk.

This vehicle is on loan from the National Museum of the United States Air Force

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