RQ-4 Global Hawk High-Altitude Long-Endurance Remotely Piloted Aircraft Family

The RQ-4 Global Hawk is a high-altitude, long-endurance remotely piloted aircraft family developed for persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance. Its autonomous takeoff and landing, distributed launch-and-recovery and mission-control architecture, and long-duration sensor coverage helped establish a major modern uncrewed-aircraft design lineage. RQ-4A, RQ-4B, EQ-4, and allied RQ-4D variants remain one family while preserving their operational configuration differences. NASA also operated Global Hawks for civil Earth science. In the Hurricane and Severe Storm Sentinel (HS3) campaign, long-duration uncrewed flights were combined with satellite observations, meteorological analyses, and computer simulations to investigate changes in Atlantic hurricane intensity. Those research aircraft carried scientific payloads specific to the campaign.