

Navy Drone Successfully Lands on Aircraft Carrier - melling
http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/07/10/navy-drone-successfully-lands-on-aircraft-carrier/?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsForth

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mpyne
Calling it a 'drone' kind of understates the accomplishment here. :) Navy
drones have already taken off from and been recovered onto ships, in the VTOL
configuration.

This is essentially an unmanned jet aircraft. It recently successfully managed
a catapult-assisted takeoff from a carrier.

Now it has completed the other end of the deal, an _arrested_ landing. (i.e.
it had to catch its tailhook on one of the arresting wires, execute a proper
glide path descent onto a moving platform, etc.)

~~~
tomgirl1
I have to disagree. You are being fooled into thinking that is a stealth
fighter or bomber. Its not.

It's a drone which is at mini-scale to the actual aircraft you may be
referring to.

Yes. We have stealth bomber looking drones at 1/3 scale to the actual thing.

And to your original point, this is obviously not a first, drones have been
taking off and landing from aircraft carriers for years.

Why the washington post is reporting this now is a better question. They are
clearly out of the loop.

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nether
> drones have been taking off and landing from aircraft carriers for years

Fixed wing? Such as?

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rdl
I really don't think Congress is exercising its budgetary oversight correctly
if it is approving nearly trillion dollar purchases of manned fighter aircraft
to be delivered a decade or more in the future. We're pretty clearly within a
transition from manned to unmanned combat aircraft, and given the lack of
compelling threats flying top-end fighter aircraft (or fielding top AA
defenses), there's no reason we couldn't keep the F-16/F-15/F-18 in service
(and whatever F-22s we already purchased) for another 10-20 years, then
replace entirely with drones.

Drones aren't just cheaper, they're _better_. Smaller, higher G loading, less
radar cross-section, no need for SAR when one goes down, potential for "in
extremis" one-way missions (intentionally sacrificing a $5mm reusable drone to
accomplish a mission is often fine), etc. The only thing they don't do is
create as many senior officers with flight experience.

(They also don't cost as much money, so to the extent you believe every dollar
spent on defense, needed or not, is a dollar stolen from humanity, ...)

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blktiger
There is one thing a human can do that these new fancy drones can't yet. Look
out the window and identify if a target is hostile or not. My understanding (I
used to be in Naval flight training) is that this is still a huge part of the
work done by pilots that these drones don't handle well.

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robryan
If that is an issue surely the answer is more assisted drones. Better to have
someone sitting in safety viewing a high def and possibly magnified camera
output to identify things that someone taking a quick look in the cockpit
while under fire.

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Jtsummers
Latency and mission. If you don't have line of sight with the drone, you've
got multisecond latency on input, that's not suitable for fighter aircraft,
though is not deal breaking for recon and air-to-ground (bombs or missiles).
So fighter drones require the pilots to have line of sight to be effective in
combat, which means you need control of ground or sea assets within range of
the air combat theater. That's not a given in war. Though, at present, this is
probably a given for the current activities of the US DOD, you can't base
future planning on current conditions.

That said, F-35 is a clusterfuck. Military contractors have had so little
oversight, and are such terrible planners, (particularly of software) that
most projects that depend on a significant software component are guaranteed
to have cost and time overruns, with little repercussion except for the poor
program manager that was thrown into the deep end and drowned.

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stcredzero
I don't see why these need to take off and land horizontally. Give them the
capability to take off and land on their tails, and the size of the carrier
can shrink dramatically. The reason why we don't use tail sitting craft is
because they are too awkward for human pilots to land. Drones wouldn't be so
limited.

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potatolicious
> _" The reason why we don't use tail sitting craft is because they are too
> awkward for human pilots to land."_

This isn't true. Taking off anything vertically requires their thrust-to-
weight ratios be higher than 1.0 (otherwise try as it might, it's going to sit
on the ground).

Modern, latest-generation fighter aircraft have a TWR somewhere between 0.75
and 1.15. If you pointed them upwards, they will _barely_ be able to lift off
the ground (if their TWR is above 1.0 at all), much less gain enough speed to
generate lift with their wings.

Taking off horizontally allows you to get lift "for free" with the wings.
Accelerating horizontally means you're not fighting gravity the whole time.
Lifting off vertically, assuming the aircraft has enough TWR to make it
realistic, is a terrible waste of fuel. Modern fighters only have a combat
radius of ~300-350mi before they have to turn around and go home. The more
fuel that is expended taking off or landing, the less actual flight (and
fight) time they have.

Catapult launches also allows you to save fuel on the aircraft by "borrowing"
the necessary energy from the launcher. Ditto arrested-hook landings that
allow you to borrow stopping force from the aircraft carrier - otherwise you'd
have to carry enough fuel to exert this force yourself.

It's certainly possible to design craft that can take off and land vertically
- the physics are relatively simple. The problem is making them practical -
the more fuel/weight an aircraft spends just taking off and landing, the less
weight can be dedicated to useful tasks, like missiles, bombs, and flying far.

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stcredzero
_> Modern, latest-generation fighter aircraft have a TWR somewhere between
0.75 and 1.15. If you pointed them upwards, they will barely be able to lift
off the ground (if their TWR is above 1.0 at all), much less gain enough speed
to generate lift with their wings.

Taking off horizontally allows you to get lift "for free" with the wings._

Well, more specifically, you are using the atmosphere as reaction mass. Wings
direct air down. It's not free lift, it's free reaction mass.

I'm not saying that you should eliminate catapult launches. But a ship large
enough to have catapults can still be a whole lot smaller than a modern US
Navy aircraft carrier. Any aircraft that can land vertically will also be able
to take off vertically. (Though with less efficiency when fully loaded, if at
all.)

There's a huge amount to be gained by being able to stage aircraft from much
smaller ships. How about building submarines a bit larger than the old Soviet
Typhoons, and having aircraft on those? Short of that, how about the ability
to build squadrons of multiple redundant cruiser-sized carriers?

Perhaps such schemes would be more valuable potential opponents of the US,
than they would be to the US.

Yes, on the whole, the system will be less fuel efficient than horizontal take
off and landing.

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starpilot
> There's a huge amount to be gained by being able to stage aircraft from much
> smaller ships.

These are called amphibious assault ships like the America and Tarawa classes.
They can serve helicopters and V/STOL fixed-wing aircraft. No catapults.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-
class_amphibious_assaul...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America-
class_amphibious_assault_ship)

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Saipan_LHA-2_amphibiou...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Saipan_LHA-2_amphibious_assault_ship.jpg)

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Tloewald
I suspect you may see submarines configured to launch drones vertically with
rocket assist and recover them using something smaller than a flight deck.
Subs already deploy SEAL teams and there has been at minimum experimental use
of remote piloted minisubs — this would be a perfect complement.

This heralds the end of the aircraft carrier (a good thing, since they're
really quite obsolete conceptually).

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lukifer
> Navy drones fly autonomously with the planes’ robot brain making the split
> second calculations necessary to conduct an arrested landing on the deck of
> a moving ship.

Is anyone else a little freaked out that this is one more step towards aerial
ED-209's?

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netcan
Me. A combination of freaked out, and feeling silly for being freaked out.

Somehow, aerial drones seem like less of a stretch than ground drones. I'm
surprised that tanks aren't being replaced by drone tanks. All the same
reasoning applies. I think the first time land battles happen between drones,
we'll get the message.

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davidw
I would think that it'd be easier to mess with communications to and from the
tank. Or that they'd get stuck in a valley or something where radio
communications aren't very good. Also, navigating on the ground is trickier
than flying in some ways, depending on the terrain.

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Fuxy
That's a big drone. I expected a drone to be smaller but that has the size of
full brown aircraft.

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antsam
Your move, Skynet.

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trimbo
That is AWESOME! It's a shame we won't get to see the code for it anytime
soon.

