Innovation Through Compromise: Alfredo Ramirez and the Global Hawk Robot Spy Plane
tactical reconnaissance drones before the Pentagon established a “fly-off” competition for development of an unmanned high-altitude, long-endurance spy plane.
It was clear that the market for unmanned aircraft was rapidly expanding, Ramirez says. But the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 also meant broader cuts elsewhere in U.S. Defense spending.
“We were basically facing a situation where if we didn’t win the contract, we were out of a job,” Ramirez says. So while Teledyne considered developing a more exotic “flying wing” design, he says the company decided it was more important to “get to first flight with fewer problems and complete flight tests with fewer problems.”
First sketch of Global Hawk
As the team’s “architect,” Ramirez says he had to accommodate requirements set by other engineering groups. The aircraft’s bulbous nose, for example, was dictated by the need to house a 48-inch parabolic dish antenna that maintains constant contact with a military satellite.
In the end, Ramirez says his approach to aircraft design “is the art of the compromise.”
“You can come up with a really exoteric, off-the-wall design,” Ramirez says. “But it doesn’t do you any good if it doesn’t satisfy all the requirements of the other teams. A balanced design inherently means a better chance for success.”
In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here.
Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University.
Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.
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