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First Robotic Drone Squadron Deployed
coondoggie writes with a link to a Network World blog post on the world's first unmanned attack squadron. The US is deploying a full squadron of combat drones to Iraq this week. These armed and remotely controlled robots can be manipulated from on the ground in the field, or via satellite from thousands of miles away. "The MQ-9 Reaper is the Air Force's first hunter-killer unmanned aircraft. It is the big brother to the highly successful and sometimes controversial Predator aircraft, which General Atomics said this week had flown over 300,000 flight hours, with over 80% of that time spent in combat. The company said Predator series aircraft have flown an average of 8,200 hours per month over the past six months while maintaining the highest operational readiness rates in the U.S. military aircraft inventory. The MQ-9 Reaper is twice as fast as the Predator - it has a 900-horsepower turbo-prop engine, compared to the 119-horsepower Predator engine - and can carry far more ordnance - 14 Hellfire missiles as opposed to two."
yup. us navy has developed the mq-8 fire scout, and its not being used by bunch of branches of us forces. its designed to provide recon, and battlefield awareness to ground forces. im sure that there are others, but from what i remember, the marines and the army have tiny uavs (backpack size) that they can launch by throwing. they got little cameras on them, and can stream video. apparently the guys on the ground love this stuff.
Flying at 50,000ft (just short of 10 miles!), with a really small engine, it would probably be hard to even hear the aircraft at all, especially in any kind of Urban environment. If you can't hear the aircraft, you don't know it is there. I couldn't find any information on a radar cross section, but I could imagine that it might be hard to target from the ground with a shoulder-mounted SAM.
For those that have seen Transformers, there is a scene when the Special Ops team calls in fire support and a Predator (or what is supposed to be one) comes over the sand dunes. From what I understand that is NOT how a Predator is used. They stand off a ways and take pictures from a high altitude (25,000ft).
What I would be really interested in hearing are anecdotal accounts by soldiers/airmen who have been either supported by or used the Predator systems. Assuming, of course, that they are allowed to talk about it.
Obligatory wikipedia links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-1_Predator Predator
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MQ-9_Reaper Reaper