Raytheon announced a subcontract from Northrop Grumman valued at up to $104 million to modernize the ground control segment of the U.S. Air Force’s RQ-4 Global Hawk unmanned aircraft. The subcontract is among recent enhancements announced for the high-flying surveillance platform. Last September, the Air Force awarded Northrop Grumman an indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract worth up to $3.2 billion for Global Hawk development, modernization, retrofit and sustainment activities.

On August 22, Raytheon said it will develop and install “building-based” mission control stations to replace shelter-based stations at Beale Air Force Base in California and Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota. Modernized mission control stations will be based on an open architecture to give the Air Force flexibility for using different mission payloads, the company said.

One new sensor will be the UTC Aerospace Systems MS-177 multi-spectral imaging camera. At the Farnborough Airshow in July, UTC said it was awarded a contract to support integration and testing of the MS-177 on the RQ-4B Global Hawk. Recent years’ enhancements to the sensor system include a gimbaled optical design, a wide area search mode and a motion imagery mode, enabling it to collect “greater than six-times more area coverage per hour“ than the current SYERS-2B sensor used on the U-2 manned surveillance aircraft.

UTC said it also has a study contract from Lockheed Martin to integrate the MS-177 system into the Air Force’s Distributed Common Ground System, which collects, processes and disseminates information from multiple platforms and sensors.

In a separate development in July, aerostructures manufacturer Triumph Group, of Berwyn, Pa., said it had signed a new memorandum of understanding with Northrop Grumman to ramp-up production rates. Triumph’s Vought Aircraft division near Dallas builds the composite wing of the Global Hawk.

“We are implementing multiple process and production improvements to significantly reduce flow days,” said Triumph president and CEO Dan Crowley. “We’re making important investments in tooling and talent to improve schedule, quality and cost for the systems.”

Asked for more detail about the production ramp-up, Northrop Grumman said that rates of particular components fluctuate but that it has “more production ahead of us than behind us” to supply five Global Hawks to NATO, four to South Korea and three more to the Air Force (through 2017) as well as the MQ-4C Triton maritime derivative for the U.S. Navy, which has a requirement for 68 aircraft.