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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."
G.W. Bush landed on a carrier years before this.
landed on a perfect clear day. wonder what happens when the seas are rough, the deck is pitching, and MOVLAS is rigged......
The first manned aircraft landing on a ship was also done on a perfect clear day after several weather driven delays.
Skynet?
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.
I'm not sure what your point is.
Similarly, the first human heavier than air flight. That's why aviation has no future whatsoever.
Landing on a carrier is much more difficult because the motions of the ship and the disturbances on the airplane are random. In space, the motions of all the objects are highly predictable.
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.
Unmanned aircraft carriers...
Good deal.
"EDI is a Warplane. EDI must have targets."
"I'm sorry, Dave. I'm afraid I can't do that."
and then the zerg discover the borg?
imagine a threesome with infested kerrigan and the borg queen... rawr!
Maybe because it clearly states WITHOUT A HUMAN OPERATOR.
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
All your base are belong to us
Nah. Navy isn't as crazy with the "classify even the fact that it exists!" as USAF is. Probably due to a culture of buying things that are too large to hide in the Nevada desert.
Great observation but i still find the calculations involved trivial.
Really Sheldon?
Show me.
"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).
I know it's a lot to RTFA but could you at least RTFS before you post.
Salty Dog was piloted entirely by computer without a human operator.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
The NSA controls the Chinese?
Wasn't that just some experiment Lockheed funded on their own, back when the SkunkWorks was still going strong? I didn't think that ever received Navy funding.
I drew out this tech in advanced training in 2004 at sheppard afb, this is just them admitting it.
this is about this particular high load model. press is getting it wrong, partly because pr is wrong.. it matters because this models development took 1.4 billion dollars.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I mean seriously, you only need to account for the real time space-time relationship of two objects, it doesn't matter how they're moving, the fractal differential equation is the same.
What the hell is a fractal differential equation? Maybe you meant a partial differential equation but I'm guessing that, at worst, the mathematics boils down to integrating out an ordinary differential equation .
Of course Navier-Stokes is easy to program. The equations have been around since the mid-1800s. They are damn tough to actually compute, which is why we don't run Navier-Stokes simulations in CFD. We run complex statistical models on top of the basic Navier-Stokes equations, in an attempt to make the simulation accurate at sufficiently coarse length and time scales that our puny modern supercomputers can actually manage. There's no way in hell their flight control system is based off the real-time computation of DNS on airborne hardware. You distill the flight dynamics down to a handful of coefficients, describing linear and angular acceleration due to control inputs at various flight conditions, and use that highly simplified model to run your flight control system.
Also, just how the fuck do you intend to control an aircraft with no moving parts? Are you proposing RCS thrusters, or some form of active flow control using compressor/exhaust bleed vents? You've been posting a lot on this topic about how you've done all this already, but you're just not making any sense. It's like you're just throwing out random technical jargon.
Wasn't that just some experiment Lockheed funded on their own, back when the SkunkWorks was still going strong? I didn't think that ever received Navy funding.
"on their own"? You mean, they printed the money? Where do you think the money came from? Oh yeah, The Pockets of The People.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
As in, money that the company had previously earned through commercial and military sales went into the development of that prototype. They were not working under any government contract, nor any direct external funding. You seem like a very bitter person...
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.
They could have been using a cute little monkey pilot, or a pigeon. Pigeons have piloted bombs before.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_data_interchange
Ezekiel 23:20
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.
Also, just how the fuck do you intend to control an aircraft with no moving parts?
You don't. An aircraft with no moving parts is an aircraft sitting on the ground. :)
Ezekiel 23:20
As someone who works at Pax indirectly involved with X-47B, I can assure you that this is current. I would have watched the event live on our video feed on Wednesday, but I've been in training all week. :(
posting AC for OPSEC considerations
Pretty sure it's been happening for a while.
Sorry you didn't get the memo... Also, why would the USAF care about landing on a ship?
+1 Disagree
Why? We've been automatically landing planes on ships for decades.
+1 Disagree
and maybe you should read the post you are commenting on. It is obvious he RTFS (and maybe even the fA) and was complaining that the *title* was wrong.
"unmanned" != "unpiloted" Remotely piloted vehicles are unmanned (technically may be, but there could be passengers).
Right here he is talking about a pilot in the seat for remote controlled planes, that is not the case for the UCLASS. It takes off, flies and lands with only simple take off, fly here, and land here commands, the same commands a pilot receives.
Computer-controlled vehicles also may be manned (e.g. Google self-driving vehicle shenanigans).
Here he is talking about the Google car driving itself but a human taking over when needed, again not was is happening with the UCLASS. There is no remote control of the plane or a cockpit for the pilot to take over with.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
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
You do tests in ideal conditions, so that if/when the test fails, the conditions can't be blamed and you can figure out the REAL reason for the failure and fix it. This is science 101 here...
...Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror, and you would not have been informed.