Air Force Shoots Down Runaway Drone Over Afghanistan


That kind of puts the kabosh on the idea that large aircraft can be made unmanned and operate unsupervised by friendly manned aircraft. Make them much bigger and you either waste a lot of money at the inevitable point of failure, or risk all your fancy technology literally falling into enemy hands.

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Why does this put the kabosh on the idea? I don't really see anything here that can't be improved upon.

Sorry to bear bad news, but the air force and defense contractors are moving increasingly toward unmanned aircraft and operations.

And I have to agree with Jefe that there's nothing that went wrong about the incident that can't be improved upon. In the same vein, the drawbacks you cite also apply to human-piloted aircraft.....except the additional complication of having a potential hostage/POW/interrogation/combat death situation to deal with.

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Is the Taliban really that much up on modern tech that they could develop their own UMA?

And what real use would it be? I don't really think they could send one over here

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Well, if they happen to capture Robert Downey Jr as well...

They might not know what to do with it themselves, but the Chinese, Iranians, or Russians would pay big money for the privilege of picking through the wreckage.

Particularly if its one of these...

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January 21, 2013: The End of an ERROR.

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
---Benjamin Franklin

That's a strange looking island.

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It looks like the unmanned french built spyplane that the idiotic danish military bought 40 of for $100 million, and then later sold to the canadian military for only $10 million, since they could never get them to fly. The canucks got them in the air quickly though, and got themselves a pretty good deal I guess.

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The Canadians can get anything to work...

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January 21, 2013: The End of an ERROR.

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
---Benjamin Franklin

Not particularly because the manned aircraft is much less likely to end up shot down.

Even if we took an immensely powerful supercomputer and built an airplane around it, the supercomputer would have an exceptionally hard time coming anywhere close to human capabilities to analyze the situation and come to a good tactical solution. Instead it would have to be programmed with rudimentary heuristics to simplify the situation. The problem with this approach is that those heuristics can be learned by the enemy and promptly exploited. Even then, the dreams of a plane which can pull more Gs than a trained fighter pilot and require no life support conveniently ignore the computers own required operating conditions including being supplied with copious amounts of electricity and the fact that electronics can break from high-gs as well.

To solve this you can use a remote control. But if you do that a manned enemy plane benefits from significantly improved reaction time, and the unmanned plane is extremely susceptible to being actively jammed, if not disrupted by any of the ordinary connection problems.

Personally I see the future for aviation not lying with computers replacing humans but with computers increasingly assisting humans in the cockpit with UAVs continuing to serve in simpler applications.

Thought this was interesting... the Marines are considering the use of Kaman's K-Max helicopter for unmanned supply deliveries in Afghanistan.

Marines Tap Kaman For Robot Helicopter | Hartford Business

__________________
January 21, 2013: The End of an ERROR.

"Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become more corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters."
"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic."
"The Constitution only gives people the right to pursue happiness. You have to catch it yourself."
---Benjamin Franklin

Yeah... helicopters crash sometimes. Especially during extreme operations like logging or fire fighting.

Maybe Predators and Reapers should fly in pairs like the F-16. I don't think this incident is a reason to stop using UAVs. They do a lot of good work.

If one did crash, the United States could put another UAV overhead to prevent hostile forces from retrieving classified information, while a recovery team is on its way.

http:/teddersrandomnotes.com/blog

The November 2009 issue of Esquire magazine has an article by Brian Mockenhaupt called, "We've Seen The Future and It's Unmanned."
Unmanned Aircraft - Future of Drone Aircraft and UAVs - Esquire

Here is a quote from the article: " An F-16 burns a thousand gallons of fuel an hour and can stay over a target for about an hour before it must swap out with another plane or refuel midair. A Predator carries a hundred gallons of fuel with which it can stay over a target for twenty-four hours." It is a very interesting story.

The Courageous Decision John Tedder's Random Notes