Last Call for Army’s ‘Flying Beer Keg’ Drone

There it was, 7,000 feet up in the sky, snapping photographs of the Iraqi landscape when it looked like it should have been slaking the illicit thirst of underage soldiers. But now the Army reports that the program that gave us a drone known colloquially as the Flying Beer Keg is all tapped out.

Pentagon acquisitions chief Ashton Carter is set to axe the drone, a vestige of the Army gazillion-dollar modernization program, Future Combat Systems, that was killed by Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2009. Boeing and subcontractor Honeywell received a stop-work order last week from the Pentagon letting them know to stop testing. And that puts the Flying Beer Keg on the chopping block.

Officially, the Honeywell-developed drone is called the gasoline-powered Micro Air Vehicle (its company name is the T-Hawk), and it’s one of the lightweight drones that the Army fielded last decade. Weighing only 17 pounds, the g-MAV has creepy, tendril-like kickstands to keep it upright, making it look like something the Galactic Empire used to hunt the Rebel Alliance. It shoots up into the sky vertically thanks to a ducted fan to take reconnaissance photos.

A National Guard unit took the Flying Beer Keg to Iraq in 2008. The Navy used earlier versions to hunt for homemade bombs.But it didn’t fly as smoothly as the Pentagon would have liked. The Beer Keg is “known for its loud noise when flying,” reports Kate Brannen of Defense News, who broke the news of the program’s end.Of course, it’s not like the Army is hurting for drones. Gates’ budget reshuffling clears the decks for the Army to buy more Cessna-sized Gray Eagle unmanned spy planes. That’s on top of its tiny drones like the 3-foot-long RQ-11 Raven or the 11-foot-long Shadow.

But civilian life has a lot to offer the Flying Beer Keg. TPM recently reported that the Miami-Dade police department bought two of the drones from Honeywell, making it perhaps the first local law enforcement organization in the United States to use spy drones in an urban area. (Hat tip to Aviation Week’s Paul McLeary.) So if you see it up in the air over South Beach, don’t try to drink out of it.

Photo: Honeywell

[Wired]