The RQ-4A Global Hawk long range High Altitude Endurance (MAE) UAV took its first flight in March of 1998 as a Advanced Concept Technology Demonstration proof of concept platform. As with the Predator medium altitude UAV, the Global Hawk UAV is capable of high altitude surveillance and reconnaissance over a greatly extended period and ranges.
The Global Hawk's electro-optical/Infrared cameras and synthetic aperture array radar give it a complete day/night all weather surveillance capability. From an altitude of 65,000 feet the SAR can generate a 10km wide strip map at one meter of resolution, and a 2x2 km spot map at one foot resolution. In Ground Moving Target Indicator (GMTI) mode, the Global Hawk is capable of detecting ground targets moving as slow as 4.5 miles per hour. The Global Hawk is capable of mapping up to 40,000 square nautical m per day and up to 1900 individual spot maps.
Equipment guide, Military.com,
http://tech.military.com/equipment/view/89669/rq-4a-global-hawk-high-altitude-uav.html
An unnmaned aircraft that can fly that long will be another step in keeping humans out of harms way. When reading all of these blogs it really does appear as if machines will take over many of the jobs that humans do now. Hopefully it will not lead to job loses and those who would normally be flying the planes are controlling them from the ground. When other military advances like this are made in other countries will it just be a fight to see who has more money? There will be no loss of life just expensive aircrafts, tanks, and machines. We will have radars that detect incoming targets before they reach our country so they will be shot down before they are able to do damage to us.
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