Predator C Avenger Makes First Flights

stoolpigeon writes "General Atomics' new unmanned combat aerial vehicle, the Predator C Avenger, has been making test flights. This new Predator has a stealthy design, 20-hour endurance, is jet powered and has an internal weapons bay. A number of photos have just become available. 'The aircraft was designed so the wings can be folded for storage in hangars or aircraft carrier operations if a naval customer is found. Cassidy, a retired admiral, has talked about a possible Navy role for Predator C since 2002. The Navy was interested in the Predator B's capabilities, but didn't want to introduce any new propeller-driven aircraft onto carrier decks. The UAV also comes with a tailhook, suggesting that carrier-related trials are planned. The inner section of the cranked wing is deep, providing structural strength for carrier landings and generous fuel volume while maintaining a dry, folding outer wing. Right now, the US Air Force and Royal Air Force are considered the most likely users.'"

Comments

F-22

[p51d007]

Possibly part of the reason they want to cancel the F-22. Yes, I think UAV's will eventually be the planes of the future, but you still need manned aircraft for a while. With a UAV, you have no environmental system for a pilot, plane can out turn (G's) one with a pilot, and most importantly, you don't put the pilots life at risk.

Re:F-22

[meringuoid]

Yes, I think UAV's will eventually be the planes of the future, but you still need manned aircraft for a while. With a UAV, you have no environmental system for a pilot, plane can out turn (G's) one with a pilot, and most importantly, you don't put the pilots life at risk.

I can't imagine why anybody would build another fighter jet after the F-22. I mean, yes, in terms of performance and stealth and all that it's every flyboy's wet dream. But the Battle of Britain was seventy years ago, and the days of heroic pilots taking each other on in exciting single combat are long gone. Planes now are just missile launch platforms, and the contest between them mostly a matter of getting the first radar lock and then letting rip; is it not therefore better to use cheap mass-produced drones for that task, rather than risking some technological masterwork and the colossal ego behind the stick over hostile territory?

Re:F-22

[meringuoid]

We need manned aircraft right now, and the F-15 is not only good enough, it's far far more than good enough.

Not necessarily. The US isn't going to sell anybody any F-22s. But the European nations are selling Typhoons to every friendly nation that has the money. And history shows us that a friendly nation today can be distinctly hostile tomorrow: that's how come there are F-14s in the Iranian air force. Skip the F-22, and some day the US might find itself going up with F-15s against Typhoons, and that's a bloody dangerous thing to be doing. F-22 represents a clear advantage over any rival aircraft of any nation for the foreseeable future, and that's what the Pentagon pays the big money for.

I expect that the F-22 will be the last of the breed - the high water mark of the fighter jet family, rarely used, and sidelined in its own lifetime by cheaper robot drones. This century's Mallard train. But in the meantime it might just turn out to be worth having.

Re:F-22

[hazem]

UAV's are awesome right up until your enemy decides that it is easier to just jam all available frequencies while launching their attacks. Frequency hopping will help but if you start losing even momentarily control your weapons start falling off target and aircraft can be dangerously uncontrollable.

The problem with jamming is it's really hard to hide a jammer (basically a broad-spectrum transmitter) from systems designed to locate transmitters. We already have aircraft designed to locate and take out radar systems http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EF-111A_Raven. This shouldn't be too hard to adapt for jammers as well. Maybe those could still be flown by human pilots.

And as the AUVs become even more autonomous, the need for high bandwidth communication will diminish, making jamming even less of a problem.

But even if you do start losing AUVs fast, they're much easier to replace than planes with pilots.

Re:F-22

[Xabraxas]

Like SkyNet?

Re:F-22

[Animats]

But the Battle of Britain was seventy years ago, and the days of heroic pilots taking each other on in exciting single combat are long gone. Planes now are just missile launch platforms, and the contest between them mostly a matter of getting the first radar lock and then letting rip;

Actually, no. Aerial combat was important in Korea, in Israel's wars, in the first Gulf War, and in the recent Georgian debacle. If the other side has air, you had better have fighters. "American troops have not had to fight under a hostile sky since WWII. This did not happen by accident." as USAF types like to say.

It's worth bearing in mind that the two big US wins against a serious opponent in recent decades were both against Saddam Hussein, who was totally incompetent at running a major war. (He had three, two against the US and one against Iran. The one against Iran was a long inept bloodbath.) Someday the US may have to take on someone who 1) has a substantial military force, and 2) a clue about how to use it.

Re:F-22

[Martin Blank]

The Ravens were retired a decade ago, and were not capable of taking out radars, but instead just blinding them. The Navy/Marine Corps EA-6B Prowler now provides most of those duties for the entire military. Unlike the Raven, the Prowler is capable of carrying anti-radiation missiles and actually striking radar sources. The Prowler is to be replaced by the EA-18 Growler (an off-shoot of the F/A-18F Super Hornet) beginning this year.

Re:F-22

[janrinok]

But I doubt you'll find a modern military in the world that uses horses now.

Er.... how about the US Special Forces? - http://www.conunderground.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/specialforces-on-horse-300x230.jpg. Or do you not consider your own SF to be part of a modern military? A sensible force will use whatever is best for the task at hand - not ignore some option simply because it isn't high tech enough. Otherwise, knives and bayonets would have disappeared many years ago, but they haven't.

Re:F-22

[sien]

We as Chinese will feel unsafe until our technology is superior to yours. We cannot yet sleep safely at night.

As your economy, due to shocking mis-management and two unwise wars is already effectively depends on our savings we don't think that overtaking your military technology will be too tough in the next 50 years.

We believe that we must be ready for any contingency. With 4 times as many people and sustained 7 percent plus growth rates we will approach, catch and overtake you.

You may not be able to sleep safely in future.

Or we could work out ways to get along.

General Atomics

[crumbz]

I just love that name for a defense contractor. Would fit right in the Fallout universe.

Re:No more parades?

[meringuoid]

So we'll be having parades of unmanned planes on trailers going down streets on Veterans Day? Salute our brave button pushers.

Works for me. You may like wars to be about heroism and patriotism and motherhood and apple pie and dulce et decorum est pro patria mori and all that bullshit, but I prefer them to be won, as quickly as possible, and with as few people getting hurt as possible. If that can be achieved by using robots instead of humans, that's just fine.

Friendly Fire. Callatoral Damage.

[DirtyCanuck]

Computer error not human. Perfect now NOBODY is to blame.

Do you work on weapons systems?

[cryfreedomlove]

There must be a lot of software written for systems like the Predator C Avenger. Are there any readers here who work on weapons systems like this? How did you decide to devote the best years of your life to creating weapons with this degree of lethality? Do you trust your customers to use them in morally just ways?

I'm curious because when I was initially ready for high tech employment, I made a conscious decision to not directly contribute to weapons related work. In the 80's, this took away a significant number of prospective employers. Now it is more than 20 years later and I am glad I made that choice.

Re:Do you work on weapons systems?

[jstults]

A "grossly obvious fact" for your consideration: "Those who 'abjure' violence can only do so because others are committing violence on their behalf." http://www.george-orwell.org/Notes_on_Nationalism/0.html

Re:Do you work on weapons systems?

[meringuoid]

You strike me as the type of person who would become a doctor and then refuse to perform abortions because it was against your "morals".

Nonsense. He's the type of person who had the ability to become a doctor, but would refuse to do so if it would come with the expectation that he would perform abortions, and so instead found a different line of work. That's a perfectly morally acceptable way to behave.

And he asks a worthwhile question too. It's similar to the question often asked of defence lawyers as to how they can defend people they know to be guilty. If you're a programmer of weapons systems, how does that sit with your conscience? Especially unmanned warplanes: while the current generation are remotely controlled by some guy with a joystick, future models are expected to be fully autonomous - which means that somebody, somewhere, right now, is working on the AI code to control them. AI code to make decisions as to whether to fire weapons. AI code to decide whether to kill somebody.

How can that person sleep at night? Since there's a realistic possibility that such a person is reading /., the question's well worth asking, and the answers could well be very interesting and illuminating.

Re:Do you work on weapons systems?

[trout007]

I design stuff that peoples lives depend on (not weapons). I'll tell you it's hard to sleep sometimes when you are finishing up a design. I often have nightmares of the product failing becuase of something I forgot. Others in the same field often have those dreams as well.

Re:Do you work on weapons systems?

[spire3661]

Decision to fire a weapon, or to be more precise the ORDER to go 'weapons hot' will remain the same as it is today, from the chain of command. It will not be making 'decisions' to fire, but rather acting on orders, just like we have today with human pilots. While yes it may run variables to determine best target, time to fire etc, the 'decision' to allow weapon fire will always come from above. I understand what you are getting at but I felt the impression you were giving was too skynet-esque for my taste.

Re:Do you work on weapons systems?

[rts008]

I lose no sleep over it.
However I could not work for the auto industry, which is responsible for 102 deaths per day in the USA.(2008)

On average, automobiles have been responsible for 44,000 deaths per year for the past 34 years for a total of 1,491,922 deaths since 1974 in the USA.

One and a half million.

That's more than twice the number of USA citizens killed than all of the wars/conflicts we have been in since joining into World War 1.

In one third the time[34 years], automobiles have killed twice as many USA citizens as 92** years of war.

If you think I'm just pulling numbers out of my ass, I did check. You can do your own research if you care, but here is the bulk of numbers(they are all US deaths for that conflict, not just soldiers, but includes civilians):

WW1= 117,465
WW2= 418,500
Korea= 35,516
Vietnam= 58,159
Gulf War= 279(half-134 were accidents)
Afghanistan= 636
Iraq War= 4,522(includes 249 contractors?)
Total= 635,437
(I did not bother with our little field trips to Panama and Grenada)

Skip the argument that cars were not deliberately designed as weapons platforms like the Predator C is. It does not change the facts that cars easily kill more Americans than wars do. The numbers don't lie: 34 years of cars= 1,491,922 dead Americans, versus 635,437 from 92 years of war.

**Today is the anniversary of US Congress' voting in Declaration of War- April 17, 1917

Predator C++

[Anonymous Coward]

I hear the Predator C++ has a whole new class structures that have all new functions.

Re:A new

[Darkness404]

Yes, rather than simply returning errors, this one shoots you whenever you make them.

Re:No more parades?

[Vinegar Joe]

Gandhi threw the British out of India using active, aggressive, non-violent resistance.

I wonder how long Gandhi would have lasted using "active, aggressive, non-violent resistance" against Stalin or Mao.

Nice

[ShooterNeo]

One very interesting thing is that General Atomics (the manufacturer of the predator) doesn't ask the Pentagon what they want. It instead makes an aircraft that is a good price/performance ratio and doesn't suck, and then offers it "as is" to the Pentagon.

This has worked incredibly well. Design decisions aren't subject to group-think or politics, and GA doesn't have to load the aircraft down with overpriced or unreliable technology in order to add some useless feature.

I think the Predator C is the culmination of this. It took them 3 years to make a working stealth aircraft, and the article states that they could have it fighting in just 1 more. That's a massive accomplishment.

I think that real world performance will eventually put drones so far into the lead that the air force cancels the buy on the F-35. Stealth technology doesn't work at all if several phased array radars in different locations are coordinating their search patterns.

Furthermore, a drone doesn't have to win 1 on 1. Dollar for dollar, even this predator C is probably be about 3 to 5 times cheaper than a high end fighter aircraft. I wouldn't bet on a manned aircraft facing down 5 drones armed with good missiles.

Re:No more parades?

[j. andrew rogers]

Gandhi threw the British out of India using active, aggressive, non-violent resistance.

That strategy worked because the opponent was the British and Gandhi understood how to exploit the culture he was fighting. It would have been a foolish strategy if it had been, say, the Soviets.

Following the money...

[copponex]

The previous Predators cost 9 million for the aircraft itself, and another 20 to 30 million for the controlling systems, from what I could read. It can carry 14 hellfire missiles, which are $25,000 a piece. I think we're spending 3 billion per year just on the aircraft acquisition.

So, every day, we send out these 10 million dollar drones, which cost a few thousand per hour to operate, with $350,000 of ammunition. 25% of these aircraft have been lost in operations. Meanwhile, $75,000 would build a school, supply it, and provide money for staff for five years in Afghanistan.

So when you're trying to prevent a young muslim from becoming a radical, what's the better option - allowing him the chance to have an education, or blowing up his brother's wedding party and then air dropping him some pudding cups with little American flags on them?

The fact that people keep choosing the second option astonishes me.

Re:Following the money...

[CodeBuster]

Meanwhile, $75,000 would build a school, supply it, and provide money for staff for five years in Afghanistan.

Which nobody would be able to attend without armed protection because the Taliban shut down any non-religuous schools that they come across (only Madrassas that teach koran + jihad are allowed to continue operating) and kill people who send their daughters to any school. Nobody will attend school if they believe that they will be shot and killed for doing so.

So when you're trying to prevent a young muslim from becoming a radical, what's the better option - allowing him the chance to have an education, or blowing up his brother's wedding party and then air dropping him some pudding cups with little American flags on them?

Your'e being naive, its not that simple. As long as the Taliban and the tribesmen are running around the countryside blowing up schools, shooting people who cooperate with us, and then escaping back across the border into Pakistan (the border is a line drawn by long dead white men really, it has little or no meaning to the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabit the region) nothing much is going to change and progress will be extremely slow if it comes at all. The Taliban are not reasonable people; they will never negotiate in good faith with the United States or anyone else from the west (they even stab their fellow Pakistani muslims in the back when they think the tables have turned and peace no longer suits them) not now and not ever and it is a waste of time to try and negotiate with them.

Re:A new

[Anonymous Coward]

C compiler?

what?

Nope. Disassembler.

Re:No more parades?

[spire3661]

This has been answered MANY times, Ghandi's approach only works when the oppressor in question is capable of shame.

Re:No more parades?

[meringuoid]

Isn't the issue here the cavalier attitude that being able to fight wars with out cost will engender. The idea of the citizen soldier was born specifically because when a society had no personal investment in a conflict they became endemic.

Depends what you want to do. You couldn't fight a war like the current campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan with drones alone - those are wars of occupation, with large numbers of infantry on the ground. The advantage comes with conflicts like those we saw from time to time in the 1990s: faction A (we like) are fighting faction B (we don't like), but we lack the will for a proper war, so we just bomb faction B's facilities and units and let faction A take advantage. That's the kind of situation where drones would be wonderful. Mind you, I don't think the risk to pilots is a major deterrent to our leaders in that case: it's more a matter of how the scenes of devastation on the ground will play with the voters, and those are the same whether it's a human or a drone that did it.

See Also: The mercenary wars fought in late medieval Europe.

According to Machiavelli, the problem with those wasn't so much that the availability of mercenaries let leaders go to war with less risk to their own people: it was that the mercenaries themselves were unreliable and disloyal. For a start they'd fight only for their pay, and so their stomach for a losing battle was considerably less; and if the mercenaries won their battle, then whatever lands had been conquered were held by the triumphant prince only so long as he kept the loyalty of the mercenaries. Whose price, of course, just went steeply upward. Better, he said, to triumph by your own arms. This, at least, is not a problem with machines, which will happily sacrifice themselves for you, more willingly than even the most jingoistic soldier.

Direct links to gallery pictures

[Anonymous Coward]

The site hosting TFA seems to be very aggressive when it comes to adverts and tracking their patrons, and like most intelligent people I object to this. It was a pain to find the right combination of allowed and untrusted domains in NoScript, whilst making sure any remaining crud was blocked by Adblock and actually getting the content. So here are the direct links to the pictures from their crappy gallery:

http://sitelife.aviationweek.com/ver1.0/Content/images/store/6/1/06e0624b-9398-40e1-91d1-7888e231a908.Large.jpg
http://sitelife.aviationweek.com/ver1.0/Content/images/store/10/7/fa4dc8b7-1aa5-477e-a704-f382762640d5.Large.jpg
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Re:No more parades?

[c6gunner]

But they will make it easier and easier for us to kill and kill and kill

How strange it is, then, that as we get better and better at killing, we seem to be more and more reluctant to do it.

and open the doors to even more horrible forms of warfare than those we practise now.

You want to talk about horrible forms of warfare, go look at what cultures of times past used to do. Genghis Khan would be a good starting point.

We are about to perform the Standford Prison Experiment with our entire society, with the West in the role of arbitrarily powerful jailers and everyone else as a prisoner.

The stanford prison experiment tested the reaction of a single individual being ordered around by an authority figure, in a controlled setting. It has no baring on large populations, especially within democratic societies.

We do it because we like it, not because it works

Killing a guy who plans to kill you tends to work quite well. If there are other, more efficient ways of dealing with the problem, then great - you'll find that even most soldiers prefer a peaceful solution. We don't actually LIKE being shot at. But it has to be a real solution, not just a delaying tactic which puts off the problem for future generations to deal with.

Re:No more parades?

[seifried]

You're thinking of Stanley Milgrams experiment. The Stanford prison experiment was something entirely different (group setting, ran several days, etc.).

Milgram experiment

Stanford prison experiment

Re:So Long Tailhookers...

[catdriver]

There's going to be a whole lot of pissed off Navy pilots if they make a UAV that can land on a carrier deck at night in crap weather. Their main reason for superiority over all other pilots will be shot to hell.

I'm the senior Landing Signal Officer for the US Navy's Atlantic Fleet, and we've actually had fully automated landing systems on carrier aircraft for a long while. The first test of any Automatic Carrier Landing System (ACLS) was in August 1957, and after extensive development the system was regularly used in Vietnam. The current AN/SPN-46 is the latest iteration, but essentially it's just a glorified missile tracking radar that feeds into the airplane's autopilot via a simple UHF datalink. It's all old tech.

While not all aircraft since Vietnam have done it well (my old F-14B Tomcat was actually worse at "Mode I" (fully coupled) ACLS approaches than the F-4 Phantom it replaced) today's Hornets and Super Hornets are very smooth when coupled up -- much smoother than the typical manual landing.

The problem comes when the system fails (something that can happen in any large automated system - in the air or on the ground). Pilots regularly practice landing by hand, because they never know when the ACLS might not be there for them. They could perform coupled approaches every pass, but they wouldn't have the skills to confidently get aboard if the system ever went away. Those skills require lots of practice to stay sharp, and landing at sea is really hard. I've been doing it for ten years, and it's still just as challenging as ever.

Sometime in the next decade the N-UCAS is supposed to demonstrate truly autonomous UAV operations in a carrier environment. It will rely on a draft version of our next-generation GPS-based replacement for the SPN-46: JPALS. It's stated goal is to fully integrate with our normal manned carrier air traffic procedures. Having seen highly trained aviators struggle with the challenges of operating around the boat, I'll be impressed if it lives up to its goals.