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Predator-Style Helmets Allow Pilots to See Through Planes
nitroy2k writes "It is only the neck and shoulders that prove there is a human being in there somewhere. And this isn't any Star Trek or Final Fantasy kind of trick, but the next generation of RAF fighter pilots' look, which kinda makes you wish you were in the army." And you thought Air Wolf had badass headgear.
And you thought Air Wolf had badass headgear.
You'll have all the kids thinking "Is Air Wolf a new game for the wii???".
FLR
I worked on a military aircraft program, and we had the same thing. A head-tracking helmet that displayed the video to the pilot and had an imposed an outline of the aircraft so you knew where you were looking.
This is really just new packaging of an old idea.
which kinda makes you wish you were in the army
So you could admire the cool helmets the Air Force, Navy, and Marine pilots have?
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
The Army flies helicopters, not fixed-wing aircraft.
Thank you for that bit of nostalgia! Now I'm browsing YouTube for cool startup sequences and intro's of AirWolf again! :)
What can I say more? Dom, give me the turbo's! :D
http://www.engadget.com/2007/11/10/new-helmet-allows-fighter-pilots-to-peer-through-the-jet/
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engadget, CA - 23 hours ago
No, the headgear in the photo above wasn't some unused prototype created for The Terminator; rather, it's a snazzy new helmet designed to give fighter
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
Within a couple of decades using a fighter aircraft with a human inside will be as quaint as using a missile with pigeons as the guidance system.
So pilots in these aircraft won't have as many blindspots as are in current aircraft? Are they planning on using this on current aircraft or as an add-on to future ones because I thought the F-22 Raprtor was the last plane in future production that actually had a pilot rather than a UAV type craft or was that just for testing?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
It's only /. posters who don't bother to RTFAs.
The functionality of this helmet is impressive, but I do take issue with the idea that because it looks good (does it?) it "kinda makes you wish you were in the army." There are potentially a lot of reasons to want to be in the military, but the way a helmet LOOKs should NOT be one of them.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
Jerks have been using these things in first person shooters for years.
Since when do 'The Terrorists' have fighters?
...
With the cold war over, and the major super powers having no one to have air battles with, is it really necessary to spend huge amounts of money to fight an enemy that doesn't exist? I mean, back in the Cold War, it made sense-ish, but since the current battle is against "terror", and "terror" doesn't have an air force
Granted - the technology is cool, and it's good to have somewhere to spend money to research tools like this, which I'm sure have other, less militaristic uses, but why should military spending dictate research?
Or is the world planning to gang up on China, and just not telling us?
We emerge from our mother's womb an unformatted diskette; our culture formats us. - Douglas Coupland
Link to the original Daily Mail article: The Terminator-style helmets that allow fighter pilots to see through their planes
Note to submitters and Slashdot editors: Don't link to blogs. They get Slashdotted.
It's especially shiatty when a blogger doesn't even provide a link to the article he's pulling his text and images from.
Interesting how the blogger switched the referenced Schwarzenegger character of choice from The Terminator to the Predator in his 'article' to make it appear as original content.
http://www.rockwellcollins.com/news/page8813.html
Clicky for bigness.
Because it's really not a FA at all... It's a blog that links to an article. Would it kill the editors to actually link to a story, instead of just bump up joehaveablog's hit counter?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
...except that the British Army doesn't fly Harriers: check here for what the Army Air Corps flies: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_active_United_Kingdom_military_aircraft ... only the RAF (the Air Force) and Fleet Air Arm (the branch of the Royal Navy responsible for the operation of the aircraft on board their ships) fly Harriers.
I wonder why this makes me think of
- Do you want to play Chess?
- No, I want to play global thermonuclear war.
That's not a nick, that's my NAME.
US Pilots have had this for a few years at least, it's called JHMCS, Joint Helmet Mounted Cueing System.
http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/aircraft/systems/jhmcs.htm
Specialization is for insects. -Heinlein
That's the whole point of the JSF... cost effectiveness. It is one modular plane with 3 variants: a traditional fighter, a STOVL marine version, and a more rugged carrier version with a hook, etc. It is designed to be one plane that can be produced for all branches (hence the term "Joint" Strike Fighter), which will lower production costs. It will replace pretty much every fighter-like aircraft in use, except for the F-22.
This plane will be the "high-tech stealth plane" taking radars out. And if it is ever engaged in a dog-fight at supersonic speeds, the pilot has done something wrong. They almost didn't even put a gun on it (only one variant got a gun, IIRC), because it is meant to take out threats WELL before they are visible.
One more thing, supersonic speeds are essential for combat aircraft... they have to get in and hit targets before anyone hears them coming (have you never been to an airshow where they do a low supersonic pass?). Supersonic capability itself isn't all that expensive... supercruising capability is more expensive, and JSF doesn't do that.
The helmet isn't "Predator-Style" in the slightest. No thermography vision at all. And more to the point, even if it had it, that certainly wouldn't allow you to "look through an airplane". Moron bloggers and the tabloids just saw a helmet that was ugly and thought of Predator.
It's really closest to a VR helmet, hooked up to cameras on the F-35 JSF to give pilots a 360 view.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Was this just an excuse to use the helmet story icon?
Or maybe a quarter-measure.
Fighter planes design is very compromised by the requirement that the pilot be able to see out the canopy. Typically, you find the cockpit cantaleivered way out in front of the center of gravity. In more recent planes, the requirements of stealth require dramatic measures to enable vision from the cockpit while still maintaining a low radar profile. I feel, too, that in any serious war you're going to find that the easiest way to bring down an airplane is to blind the pilot with lasers.
So, put the pilot right in the middle of the airplane in an opaque cockpit. Put a large number of wide-bandwidth sensors on the plane that would enable the pilot to see better than he could with his own eyes, certainly over a wider frequency and contrast range. You could armor this cockpit much more easily, it could be far more stealthy, and it could be far more structurally sound. You could have redundant sensors that could be deployed if the primary sensors are blinded.
Now, some might say that we should go all the way and put the pilots on the ground -- and they have a point. But, I think that the amount of bandwidth available inside the plane would be far greater than you could ever hope to transmit securely over the air.
Thad Beier
I love Mondays. On a Monday, anything is possible.
http://news.softpedia.com/news/Predator-Style-Hemlets-Allow-Pillots-To-See-Through-Planes-70542.shtml
As far as I am concerned, It isn't as much who's hit counter needs increased the most. It is about who's site released the article and how many people can view it.
Obviously, when a site releases an news story, their the ones who should be credited with it. So I guess they shouldn't be attributing this story to some under-bandwidth blogging content thief in the first place. let alone doing so in a way that no one can read the damn article because of some seriously lacking forethought of the submitter or the site in question.