Slashdot Mirror
Boeing Turning Old F-16s Into Unmanned Drones
dryriver sends this news from the BBC:
"Boeing has revealed that it has retrofitted retired fighter jets to turn them into drones. It said that one of the Lockheed Martin F-16s made a first flight with an empty cockpit last week. Two U.S. Air Force pilots controlled the plane from the ground as it flew from a Florida base to the Gulf of Mexico (video). Boeing suggested that the innovation could ultimately be used to help train pilots, providing an adversary they could practise firing on. The jet — which had previously sat mothballed at an Arizona site for 15 years — flew at an altitude of 40,000ft (12.2km) and a speed of Mach 1.47 (1,119mph/1,800km/h). It carried out a series of maneuvers including a barrel roll and a 'split S' — a move in which the aircraft turns upside down before making a half loop so that it flies the right-way-up in the opposite direction. This can be used in combat to evade missile lock-ons. Boeing said the unmanned F-16 was followed by two chase planes to ensure it stayed in sight, and also contained equipment that would have allowed it to self-destruct if necessary. The firm added that the flight attained 7Gs of acceleration but was capable of carrying out maneuvers at 9Gs — something that might cause physical problems for a pilot. 'It flew great, everything worked great, [it] made a beautiful landing — probably one of the best landings I've ever seen,' said Paul Cejas, the project's chief engineer."
True. However, the summary indicates testing was done over the Gulf of Mexico, although the article isn't clear. It does say they exceeded Mach 1, which is generally prohibited over populated areas except in emergencies, so that's another indicator they were over water.
And military pilots are expected to be able to handle 9G with a G-suit, but only briefly, and the structural limits for the F16 are beyond a human's limits for sustained G-forces, so there's a potentially great improvement in performance.
As an aside, I read that the Blue Angels (and presumably the Thunderbirds) pull sustained 7G during their maneuvers without a G-suit, which is impressive.
my, your, his/her/its, our, your, their
I'm, you're, he's/she's/it's, we're, you're, they're
While we are on topic, what would prevent an enemy missile from having an onboard jamming unit to jam the control signals coming from a remote pilot to the plane? Does == ? Or are these planes equipped with a Borg shield adaption (i.e. rotate frequency) mechanism that makes jamming very difficult?
& using near obsolete aircraft to boot at low cost. What is not to like?
If memory serves me correctly, there's nothing all that new here. Back around 1960, the USAF was flying radio controlled WWII bombers out over the Gulf of Mexico to use in interception tests. Same thing, today? Better technology.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
This is the future of aerial combat. No need to risk a pilot's life, no need for a $400,000,000 F-22 Raptor, if you can turn at 9G, you can outperform just about anything with a human being in it.
I'm all for it. Take them all out of mothballs and make them all into drones.
there are 3 kinds of people:
* those who can count
* those who can't
An F-16 can carry 4 2,000-lb bombs at the absolute most (and anything after two is risky on the wings).
It has 9 hard-points to hang ordinance on, but two of those (1 and 9) are wingtip rails, which means AIM-9 missiles. It will usually have 1-3 "bags" (fuel pods) hanging off of stations 4, 5 (centerline, under the fuselage), and 6. You'll need them in some combination to get any kind of real combat range (otherwise you're stuck with ~900lbs of internally-stored fuel, which ain't jack.) The big bombs would hang off of stations 3 and 7.
Now anti-personnel and fragmentary bombs? You can pack a buttload of 'em on that, and add in two AIM-9 Air-Groung missles to do some damage (which is what most ground-attack configured F-16's carry).
I am curious if they can slave in a LANTIRN pod kit onto the things and use that to get all-weather capability... though I can't remember if they retrofitted any of the A/B model jets to carry those.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
It spent the last 15 years sitting in a glorified junkyard. That's a greater sacrilege than having these birds in the skies again, regardless of the pilots' location...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Put another way, in 50 years, at airshows, we will be seeing an F-16 flying and the announcer will say it's one of the last X flying examples in the world.
Sad.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
Well, yes, of course.
You didn't actually believe the line about:
the innovation could ultimately be used to help train pilots, providing an adversary they could practice firing on.
did you?
First, this isn't all that innovative, its been done to creating target drones for decades.
Second, this is still a front line aircraft, no matter how many we have in mothballs, because the usual target countries have nothing close. Its also fairly stealthy for its age, and its payload is in excess of 15,000 pounds of munitions even with a full load of fuel. You are not going to be using that quality of plane for a target drone.
Its meant as a delivery platform, piloted from afar, for very dangerous areas.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Yes, I am being sarcastic, for those who are sarcasm impaired.
I fail to see any sarcasm. Your post is a simple statement of fact: Military planes exist to carry out military operations. Duh.
Previous target drones were intentionally one use only.
Au contraire. The Air Force and the Navy both had F-86's modified so they could be flown either by a live pilot or by RC. The Navy had a squadron of them, called QF-86's, in California that provided drone services for all military users on the West Coast.
Pilots would make a number of unarmed sorties against live-pilot machines to practice the techniques, then take a few actual shots at unmanned ones. Live-fire missions were done out over the water, so if a drone was damaged and unsafe to land, they could safely deep-six it.
Every flight of a military aircraft goes into a logbook, and if a drone wasn't manned, the entry for pilot name would be NOLO: No Onboard Live Operator. Navy pilots referred to those missions as "shooting down Ensign Nolo".
The Culver Aircraft Co. produced a small piston-powered aircraft that worked the same way in the post-WW2 years called the PQ-14; a few of them found their way into private hands, with the remote controls removed.
The other interesting thing is, you will notice that all aircraft always only perform positive G maneuvers (ie, to turn left, you roll left, then pull up.) The human body can sustain far less negative G's.
It will be very interesting to watch these aircraft perform in a combat situation now that they are not limited by the physical issues with a human in the cockpit.
I imagine it would be very difficult to catch a fighter jet that has the capability to perform a 'split-s' maneuver without first inverting, or can perform 'S' maneuvers by just rolling right, then pulling up then pulling down - rather than the traditional way of rolling right, pulling up, inverting, then pulling up again.
They might only be shooting at them now, but it doesn't look like it will be long before pilots just sit in cockpits on an aircraft carrier and control their aircraft in combat.
I remember working on F-4Ds. Those (or were they -Gs?) were turned into both drones as targets. QF was the designation I think.
As were F-100s, F-104s, even F-86s, almost all as target drones.
Nothing new to see here, unless one of these shoots down something fast. That would be cool.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Um.. this is NOT new. I used to work at a Naval Aviation Depot where they where making F-4's into radio controlled target drones way back in the 80's. The radio controls where a bit more basic, but the Navy still used them for target practice with live ammo. I remember that after the controls where fitted, some lucky test pilot would get to sit in the aircraft and watch while the guys on the ground tested things.
So, been there, done that.... Have a T-Shirt.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
They've been doing this for years with old F-4s for target practice over the Gulf. Must be running out of lead sleds. QF-4
The F-16 is difficult to fly due to its natural instability. It's a good candidate to be operated by a computer. (I mean, it can be told where to go by a human, but the second-to-second flying should be handled by a machine.)
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
Sure, but it's better than having the whole thing land on someone's place. Not to mention that it flew from Tyndall AFB to the Gulf of Mexico according to the article (which is odd thing to say, considering Tyndall is on the Gulf Coast, but I assume it means that it flew out over deeper waters), which means that self-destructing would mean it wouldn't make it back to land to cause damage in the first place.
Also worth noting: if you think that would ruin your day, consider the fact that the space shuttles had self-destruct capabilities as well, in case they went out of control. Imagine that landing on your house. Actually, to get a bit grim (and not at all in the direction I originally planned for this comment), for some of us we don't really need to imagine, since we helped clean up the wreckage spread out across Texas following Columbia, most of which wouldn't have killed anyone from impact. In fact, related to that, the source for that fact about the self-destruct is a family friend who's now a retired astronaut that flew on four flights. They offhandedly mentioned the self-destruct (which earned me a well-deserved remark from them that made me feel like the ass I was after I said something along the lines of "that's so cool!") shortly before flying on STS-109.
For those of you not keeping score, STS-109 was the last successful flight that Columbia flew. STS-107 was its next and last one. And as you might guess from the numbering, 107 was originally scheduled to fly first, but due to delays, NASA swapped the two missions in the schedule. It's the sort of thing that really does get you thinking about what a person means to you and what life would be like if they were suddenly not a part of it any longer.
Anyway, I'm way off-topic. Suffice to say, self-destruct = a good thing to have in case something goes very wrong.
You can stop jacking off now
Such a noble and iconic aircraft turned into a play toy.
If I recall correctly the F16 was a Tier 2 fighter, specifically designed to be cheap to buy and cheap to run — quantity was a higher priority than capability, as least compared with its larger two-engined brethren. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but "noble and iconic" seems a bit much.
I don't think a 10 year old in a whore house is going to be very naive. At least not for long.
They were flying these years ago. I am sure the F-16 drones are much improved... but it basically the same thing.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
You think F-4 is old? What about B-52s! New in 1952, those haven't been used in combat since ... oh, never mind.
Ummm...while this is partially true (humans don't do negative G well) what is also true is airplanes don't do negative G well. It takes a lot of structure to make a 40-50,000lb airplane that can pull 9G's in one direction. Making one that can do it in two directions would also make it really heavy. Also, various liquids essential to operation (like fuel and oil) perform very poorly in the -G environment for more than about 30 seconds. Sure you could engineer your way out of that, but more weight and more cost.
Airplanes do best when all their G goes down, the way they spend 99% of their life. The G-limit on Predator/Reaper class UAVs is something like +2.5, no negative.
Since they still know their speed, bearing, altitude and attitude, they wouldn't necessarily crash.
If I were programming the logic with very little on-board processing power, I would have them automatically ascend to a set altitude then fly straight and level until they regain consciousness.
If you had a fair-bit of on-board processing power, you might look at flying them up to a random high altitude, then execute a quasi-random set of evasive maneuvers while heading along a bearing that was set at the beginning of the mission - ie. towards friendly territory - in an effort to regain consciousness.
Either way, it would make it a much easier target and far less of a threat.
Modern military autopilot systems can use camera-based navigation by recognising terrain features from satellite images. Once you have enough processing power, GPS becomes pretty irrelevant.
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
If you replace 80kg (average human) of flesh with 80kg worth of computers and batteries, I think you'd have a considerable amount of processing power available to you... unless the electronic control devices (actuators & sensors) weight considerably more than the manual kind, which I doubt.
Actually, it works out even better than that...
* human = 80 kg
* 7-G-resistant flight suit = 10 kg (estimate)
* oxygen tanks for pilot with several hours of oxygen weigh how much??
* no need for additional batteries/power, becaus the pilot would need power pump oxygen for breathing, plus illuminate instruments at night
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
If you think about it critically, these aircraft have onboard radar (and other combat sensors), and a flight log.
So, it would know where it last was, how far and in which direction it has traveled since loosing GPS, and what the wind-speed was on the way to where it is.
It would likely also have contour maps of the terrain it is flying over, and ground sensors.
So, with a modest bit of on-board computer power you could have it hit a high altitude and head home via the least-risk path, execute a long list of pre-determined evasive makeovers, have it open fire at anything it has a 99% confidence is an enemy entity - or for some real fun, have it work out where it is on the map, then fly about 30 ft above the terrain at mach 1.6 in the general direction of home.
These QF-16s, while older A/B models, will present a much more realistic target
since that's what we sold to our future adversaries in the first place...
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Its hardly going to be secret. Neither were Predators.
Look at the variety of weapons you can carry on F16s. You can't get half that on a predator.
Can any of then carry HARM Missiles? No.
AGM-154 Joint Standoff Weapon? No.
Your numbers are simply wrong:
Predator C:
Empty weight: 1,130 lbs (512 kg)
Loaded weight: 2,250 lbs (1,020 kg)
Max. takeoff weight: 2,250 lbs (1,020 kg)
Now tell me again how you are going to hang 6800 pounds on that airframe?
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.