NASA Selects AITI for Global Hawk
Storm Scope & Weather Systems

01The Mission

NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center — now the Armstrong Flight Research Center — operates two Global Hawk unmanned aerial vehicles for Earth-science research. The aircraft is purpose-built for missions that no manned aircraft can sustain: 30 hours aloft, up to 60,000 feet, and ranges exceeding 11,000 nautical miles. Among NASA's most demanding uses of the platform are direct overflights of tropical cyclones and major Atlantic and Gulf hurricanes.

Those missions take Global Hawk through some of the most violent weather on Earth. NASA needed onboard sensing, cockpit-equivalent situational awareness for the ground-station pilot, and a way to route around the worst convective activity in real time — capabilities the platform did not originally have.

02What AITI Delivered

AITI was selected by NASA Dryden for three substantial flight-instrumentation programs on the Global Hawk. Each was a complete subsystem — sensor integration, embedded software, ground-station display, and data-link plumbing — engineered to operate at the platform's altitude and endurance envelope.

03How the System Works

Lightning and weather data captured by the airborne sensors are transmitted from the air vehicle to NASA's ground control station and rendered on a color moving map. The Global Hawk pilot — sitting at a console on the ground — sees the storm field in front of the aircraft the same way a cockpit crew would, and can route around dangerous convective activity in real time during science missions over Atlantic and Gulf hurricanes.

For AITI, the work spanned the full life cycle in-house: aeronautical and electrical engineering, mechanical integration, embedded software, qualification testing, and production delivery. Every deliverable was produced under AITI's AS9100 quality system and ITAR-registered processes.

04About the Platform

The Northrop Grumman RQ-4 Global Hawk is the largest and most sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicle in operational use. For NASA's Earth-science mission set, it is uniquely capable.

05Why It Matters

NASA's selection of AITI for three Global Hawk programs reflects what AITI is built to do: design, build, qualify, and deliver custom flight instrumentation for platforms where there is no off-the-shelf product line that fits. The work also gave NASA Earth Science a measurable safety lift — convective weather is the single largest aviation risk in tropical-cyclone overflight, and the Global Hawk fleet now flies those missions with cockpit-equivalent situational awareness for the ground-station pilot.

• Customer: a U.S. federal research agency operating one of the most demanding airborne science platforms in the world
• Scope: three discrete subsystem programs (lightning, weather, traffic), each delivered end-to-end
• Mission impact: safer high-altitude long-endurance science missions over tropical cyclones
• AITI capability demonstrated: full-cycle avionics development — sensors, embedded software, ground-station integration, qualification, and production — under AS9100 and ITAR