Slashdot Mirror
Push a Button, Land on a Carrier
sane? writes "Putting an aircraft down on a carrier in bad weather is the stuff of melodramatic Hollywood films. Automated systems for conventional aircraft and big carriers has been done for a while, but getting a hovering Harrier, helicopter, or future JSF to land on a pitching deck of a smaller ship is a different matter. This week QinetiQ demonstrated a complete autoland - a significant step towards making the future JSF work."
I don't see a lot of geek content here, just American type propaganda.
Well, a British aeroplane (Harrier), a British company (Qinetic), a British ship (HMS Invincible), carried by a British news service (BBC). Damn this Americanisation. Oh... what language are these posts in, English?
Plus its pretty cool, IMHO, that a computer can do this given the huge difficulty and inability to simplify the process (wind, gravity, thrust) into simple mechanics.
Even a single seater fighter is a big beast, compared to say, a family car. If you've ever seen a Harrier thump down on the deck of a carrier, you'll see that the suspension gives considerably more than 10cm as the plane makes contact. I think 10cm is more than good enough - certainly better than any current pilot, and they seem to do OK.
Despite all the skepticism being bandied about military technology on this site, automated carrier landings are not new. The first fully automated landing on an aircraft carrier took place on Aug. 12, 1957, when an F3D Skyknight was landed on USS Antietam (CVA 36) at sea off Pensacola, Fla., by the Automatic Carrier Landing System (ACLS). That's right, over 40 years ago. That system is still in wide use today, and is only now slowly being replaced by the JPALS (Joint Precision Approach and Landing System) system which uses GPS instead of the radar used by ACLS.
The QinetiQ system described in the article (which is itself a component of JPALS) is remarkable in that it automates vertical landings. I'm kind of uncertain as to why that had never been done before, though I think it has more to do with the much lower level of interest, and therefore funding, than because of any technical challenge.