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First Successful Unmanned Drone Landing On an Aircraft Carrier
redletterdave writes "Salty Dog 502 flew from the Patuxent River Naval Station in Maryland to the USS George H.W. Bush operating off the Virginian coast, but unlike other drones, Salty Dog was piloted entirely by computer without a human operator. The unmanned operation is considered one of the most difficult operations due to navigating the air and a moving ship, and many have said it's a major milestone in the development of drone warfare. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus described the event as witnessing the future and compared it to the first manned aircraft landed on a carrier in 1911."
not really... the NSA can control them directly. probably the chinese too. all hail... the current power structure existing as-is.
landed on a perfect clear day. wonder what happens when the seas are rough, the deck is pitching, and MOVLAS is rigged......
G.W. Bush landed on a carrier years before this.
Skynet?
"unmanned" != "unpiloted"
Remotely piloted vehicles are unmanned (technically may be, but there could be passengers).
Computer-controlled vehicles also may be manned (e.g. Google self-driving vehicle shenanigans).
What will happen next is:
Unmanned Drone Landing On Unmanned Aircraft Carrier.
It's time for this war-footed nation to put down it's weapons of mass destruction and join the world community in peace.
America, we of the world do not like your hegemony.
it's great that US mil think they are hot shit with unmanned drones but the japanese beat them a year ago in a big way. The stakes are waaay higher in space. Worst case for a drone crash on a carrier is billions in damage. Worst case in space is taking down our only space station that took over a decade and 100 billion dollars to build and turn the station into a massive hazard for all future space missions.
and if you think getting Hellfire missile dropped on you is bad, just wait 'til you get hit by a Rod From God. ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
And after that:
Air Force will realize that it's stupid to have a carrier that's also a boat, build a plane and the prophecy that is Starcraft will come to pass.
... whatever
I know. It's the wrong George. It'll still be a long time before that gets old for me.
The real question in my opinion is what kind of guiding system do the drones use. Flying by radar guidance is something that we have been doing for a long time, surface to air or air to air missiles use it to lock on a stay on target, unfortunately flying with active radar turned on you are putting a bullseye on yourself that makes it trivial for a enemy with any kind of air defenses to easily track it and shoot it down. Flying with visual guidance is considerably harder (by visual guidance I don't mean simply terrain contour matching to figure out its current location like the tomahawk). Most don't appreciate just how fast the human brain is in quickly figuring out and processing relevant information in the insane amount of visual data that enters our retinas every instant. Computers are nowhere near as good yet.
No. Next is unmanned plane landed on unmanned plane.
The Salty Dog is one of two X-47B aircraft built by Northrop Grumman to experiment with incorporating drones onto aircraft carriers. It has a 2,000-mile range and can carry two guided bombs, though it is primarly designed for around-the-clock surveillance. The Salty Dog cost $1.4 billion.
The drones probably won’t see any combat. After a minimum of three landings on a carrier in the next week, they will be retired to flight museums in Florida and Maryland.
Instead, the Navy’s UCLASS program will design and build drones for aircraft carriers over the next three to six years. These drones will be used for both reconnaissance and strike missions. According to Reuters, they could be valuable as a counter to missiles in China and Iran designed to limit the range of the U.S. Navy.
They could have proven out the guidance systems with less expensive hardware. I'm sure some portion of those Billions was directly related to the effort but a significant amount was also dumped into the plane itself as labor and not recoverable.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
wasn't drone enough? is anyone aware of manned drones?
We go from TopGun-esque hotshot pilots to backdoor joystick fiddlers.
I drew out this tech in advanced training in 2004 at sheppard afb, this is just them admitting it.
Unmanned aircraft carriers...
You need to eliminate the moving wing parts so the computer controls the thrust and a human can just tell it what to do. The navier-stokes of a well designed craft are easy to program.
Good deal.
and then the zerg discover the borg?
imagine a threesome with infested kerrigan and the borg queen... rawr!
Flying aircraft carriers? It's been done
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
Fascinating. I wonder why they kept taking it on drills but not include the fixed wing aircraft that were supposed to be the main selling point (did they not know this yet, or was it a spending issue?).
... whatever
for more creative, expensive and automated ways to spread the empire's deadly liberal "freedom".
no it will do this to your civillians
trust us
And we are one day closer to the realization of SkyNet.
Will realize? The Air Force has been saying that for seventy years. They would just be tickled pink if the DOD stopped giving the Navy money, and bought them tons of new bombers.
The reason was at least hinted at in the article. Airships were too vulnerable.
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a space station is much more stable than a carrier on a pitching sea.
Correct. And there's no wind to worry about. And you can take your time and do it as slowly as you want - whereas a plane has to keep above a minimum speed or it stalls. In other words, it's a completely different job, I don't even know why we're comparing the two.
I fail to see how this is terribly new or revolutionary from a tech standpoint. I was stationed aboard a carrier in 1985 when the first fully hands off automated landings of F-18's were tested. Seems to me that if we were able to do that in '85, how is this revolutionary. The only new feature is that the computer intercepted the landing system signals itself before landing, hardly a task that hasn't been in every autopilot for over e generation now.
The headline implies that there have been other, unsuccessful attempts at landing a UAV on a carrier (or else 'first successful' sounds redundant). Yet there is no mention of the failures.
Don't wanna go to Tejas. My beloved home state, Georgia, is plenty bad enuf. Goto WNC mebbe, and do some drone work, but that kinda depends on a gal in TN who makes Ed's dancer unremarkable.
Excuse me, I'm just fucking off this morning. I have to do an important web site for a bigshot client, and it means reimaging a server, which is a big PITA even with backups.
later, /.-is-my-journal
What if ... the innovators of aircraft carriers, also had this robotic tech at the time they invaded both the Alaskan and Hawaiian Islands, including an attempt to use incendiary bombs to burn up the American west coast forests after obliterating all but 5 ships of the U.S. Navy and killing 2500 Americans in a couple of hours.
How is sketching it on a whiteboard the same as actually doing it? I've sketched out the tech for sending a manned mission to mars, but it doesn't mean I'll be calling bullshit if or when they ever succeed in doing it for real.
They are even closer to the perfect weapon, one where you enter a command and it does the task no questions asked.
The ground crew just fuels it and sticks missiles on it, they never know what it's doing or where it's going.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I sometimes feel infested...after a really big lunch. "For the *BRRRRPPP* swarm!"
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling