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Droning On
MagnetarJones writes "Another washingtonpost.com article reports that Federal regulators have begun considering rules that would allow drones, the pilotless planes being used in the war in Afghanistan, to fly in U.S. airspace. Supporters envision the use of drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, for such tasks as moving cargo, pinpointing traffic problems, patrolling the border, searching for fugitives or fighting forest fires..."
or hacked into and then crashed into buildings in NY
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I'm pretty sure they are talking about the technology that allows the Predator to fly around without a crew/pilot. Simply take what they have and put it into a C-130 or some other plane and there you go.
Heck, they were talking about this stuff after 9/11/2001. Using this technology so a ground pilot can fly a plane that has been comprimised. Quite an interesting idea.
Has Comcast disconnected your Internet account? Same here. You can read about it at http://comcastissue.blogspot.com
But at least the drones will be armed with missles, as opposed to the helicopters which are just filled with multinational troops armed to the teeth. A few of those missles can sure clear up a traffic jam caused by those the administration have determined to be so obviously guilty that no trial is necessary. So don't even ask about it.
What's the cargo capacity on one of those drones? I don't think FedEx will replace its 747 with those anytime soon. Its like saying look, this miata is bunches cheaper then that cargo-bus... Lets get Greyhound to swap out their fleets of busses with these self-driving miatas :)
Who doesn't deserve a trial ? You ? Who are we at war with ? I don't seem to recall congress declaring war, so the BEST we could have is a police action against an indeterminate group without a nationality. Don't get me wrong, we should be fighting terrorism but this "war" is a very poor attempt to cover up a grab for oil. If we were REALLY interested in weapons of mass destruction we'd be paying MUCH CLOSER attention to the former Soviet Union's arms and where they are going, not to mention Pakistan and India. This will be referred to as the Oil War in the future I bet, and I really doubt GWB will be remembered fondly in the years to come by anyone not a member of the Oil Cartel. The rest of us will recall him as the President who sold the US to the corp's for a bag of magic seeds. Speaking as someone who is disgusted with the Feds reversal of nearly every environmental edict on the books, the US is marching backwards in lock step stupidty.
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Initially, use them as cargo carriers in Alaska and northern canada. Have them fly in a certain airspace, perhaps 40K-45K. let this happen for 5-10 years. Then, move them over more populated areas after a successful probabtion period. Or give them a longer probabtion period as overseas cargo carriers.
Once, you remove the need for pilots and crew, these aircrafts are much easier to build and cheap to fly.
BTW, it will not be the politicians that will fight this but ALPA and other pilot unions.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
This is all great, except that during the Kosovo conflict, 10 times as many drones were lost as manned vehicles.
Isn't that the point. We use them for things that are either risky, or make demands (like many hours on station) that we wouldn't attemp with a crew on board.
Three of the Air Force's six Global Hawks, which cost about $35 million a piece, have crashed.
In the same amount of time as those Global Hawks you are talking about, the Air Force had a number of fighter aircraft go down during training missions. Those aircraft cost more than the Global Hawks do, cost way more to run, and involved the loss of some pilots. Aircraft are not risk free, gravity always wins, and sometimes not very nicely.
About half of the 50 much smaller, $4.5 million Predators have been lost, including some that were shot down, according to the Air Force's own data.
We send up drones in conditions that we wouldn't send normal aircraft and pilots. The Predators have a limited flying altitude, limited flying speed, limited visibility for the remote pilot, and can't fly above some kinds of weather, which resulted in some of them coming down the hard way. If you need information, you don't want to risk a pilot, or you need on station capabilities that manned aircraft can't give you (like shifts of controllers), you send in a drone. Naturally more of them are lost than piloted aircraft. That's one of the reasons we use them. Remember, in a war situation, someone has to fly in with a helecopter to rescue the downed pilots, risking another multi-million dollar aircraft, and many more soldiers. The drone can be abandoned, people can't be.
Remember, 9/11 was a result of a low-tech, low-cost, guerilla style attack requiring next to zero social engineering to accomplish. The guys just entered the country with appropriate looking papers, got on planes without any remarkable weapons, and hijacked them.
Hacking a remote drone would almost certainly have to involve an inside job, where protocols were known and encrypted communications channels were decoded previous to the flight. It would be relatively easy, however, to throw together a DoS attack by flooding all carrier channels with useless static and cause the drone to fail.
The only thing that prevents this from happening with military drones is the large amount of available spectrum dedicated exclusively to the military, as well as the amount of power the military can use to power their comm signals.
I don't mean to be rude, but I think you misunderstood me. They didn't crash it the way they wanted to. Failure to test a hypothesis correctly is the only kind of failure you can have in science. I don't suggest they should have manned it with suicide pilots, of course. My intention is to illustrate that it's hard to fly a large plane like a 707 by remote control based on a video feed from the cockpit and instruments. I also wanted to humorously illustrate that the history of remote-controlled flight isn't an illustrious one. I apologise for failing (I'm new and haven't gotten a good feel for /. humor yet - kinda like having the second episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation be a "funny" one, despite the fact that the characters weren't well developed yet.) :)
"This is all great, except that during the Kosovo conflict, 10 times as many drones were lost as manned vehicles."
What does this have to do with civillian flights? How many UPS planes fly into combat zones regularly?
Here is the original text from the article (differences between this and the plagiarized text are bolded):
Now, the plagiarized text:
So this went from a set of quoted statements to a set of unquoted and misquoted statements, with a few occasional word changes. This entirely constitutes plagiarism, and it should not be tolerated by you, me, or slashdot moderators.
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(*)Emergencies such as mechanical snafus, traffic crossing the runway, or wind microbursts...all of which translate as making a decision to get back up in the air right now!