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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.
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.
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...
All your base are belong to us
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
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...
Why? We've been automatically landing planes on ships for decades.
+1 Disagree