USN droid plane progressing rapidly

[Werner]

• US navy's robot carrier plane building fast
  Droid Top Gun to make deck landings in 2011
  By Lewis Page
  Published Tuesday 27th November 2007 14:38 GMT
  
  
  
  The US Navy's new stealth robot carrier plane is now "structurally complete", according to its maker, and is now being fitted out with subsystems while software tests begin. The Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstrator (UCAS-D) is expected to make its first flight the year after next, and its first carrier deck landing in 2011.
  • "Once we get robust flight controls we will begin failure detection and accommodation testing, which is the real key to any unmanned aircraft," said Scott Winship, UCAS-D project chief at Northrop Grumman, talking to Flight International.
  Although a firm decision by the US Navy to build UCAS-D was only reached a few months ago, the project is well advanced because Northrop are using a design developed during the earlier, cancelled US airforce/navy Joint UCAS programme.
  
  "We're finishing a programme started seven years ago," Winship told Flight.
  
  The $635m UCAS-D contract will see Northrop produce a brace of aircraft and - if successful - prove that they can operate from US Navy carriers, traditionally considered one of the more demanding flight environments for human-piloted jets.
  
  If the project succeeds, one of the last major piloting feats will have been replicated by robot aircraft. Autonomous systems have already shown that they can perform landing, takeoff, fly missions and even do air to air refuelling.
  
  Human passengers will probably always insist on having a human pilot up front. Anyway, an airliner wouldn't become a lot more efficient for having its pilots removed because it already has to carry hundreds of people. Robot airlines aren't on the cards any time soon.
  
  But a pilot and his accompanying paraphernalia (ejection seat etc) are a noticeable load and a serious limiting factor for military aircraft. The human restricts potential time in the air and maximum G loads as well as payload. There is a real technical case for unmanned combat jets, especially autonomous ones which don't need a high-bandwidth comms link. But few machines get built unless people with money want them; and in this case a lot of the people with the money are pilots and see themselves as warriors. They would lose both identities, conceivably, if autonomous or remotely-operated combat jets became widespread.

Source URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/27 ... _progress/

[Dave Wooley]

This is certainly an exciting area of development and one that holds out great promise for the future of carrier aviation. The MOD have been giving serious consideration to UACVs for some time . but would they be able to perform the same tasks as successfully as a manned aircraft ?
The X47B

Dave Wooley

[HMAS]

I don't see a major problem with performing the same as manned craft.
If the intel is wrong the wrong area will still be obliterated. AA fire will have to be better.
& its easier to use the weapon against your own people if req! no pilots with a conscience to hinder your world domination plans.

[reigels]

...its easier to use the weapon against your own people if req! no pilots with a conscience to hinder your world domination plans.

Care to expand on this one?

[bengtsson]

I don't see a major problem with performing the same as manned craft.
If the intel is wrong the wrong area will still be obliterated. AA fire will have to be better.
& its easier to use the weapon against your own people if req! no pilots with a conscience to hinder your world domination plans.

Also no PoW pilots on Iranian TV. This PoW issue is a big factor with the USN. Other than that, what is the advantage of pilotless A/C and wouldn't the signal stream between controller and plane be ripe for electronic warfare jamming?
" The world in Mine" D. Evil MD,
Bob B.

[Werner]

This is a remotely piloted vehicle, not an autonomous craft. There are still pilots, just not on the craft.

It also requires a secure datalink back to the driver. I would love to know how they plan this in combat, but I imagine that's a closely guarded secret.

If it were my design, I'd use a Laser datalink which could connect to a variety of sources from satellites to controller aircraft.

[bengtsson]

This is a remotely piloted vehicle, not an autonomous craft. There are still pilots, just not on the craft.

It also requires a secure datalink back to the driver. I would love to know how they plan this in combat, but I imagine that's a closely guarded secret.

If it were my design, I'd use a Laser datalink which could connect to a variety of sources from satellites to controller aircraft.

Good question Werner. I'de also like to know how they are going to maintain a secure data link. Anything transmitted through the atmosphere is available for pick up and jamming. Sure they can code the data in a secure manner, but the carrier can be jammed.
Electronic warfare is not an "only one can play" game. And the electrical engineers, software engineers and systems engineers are more likely to be coming out of Chinese and Indian universities. I guess we can hire them on the free market.
I fail to see the value in the system over manned A/C, unless avoidence of the casualties or POWs is why they are doing it. My son in law would have loved a remotely driven transport truck when his was blown up in Iraq. I doubt they value the grunts like they value the pilots though.

Bob B.

[Werner]

The explanation for the interest in this is a smaller, lighter vehicle can carry more payload if it is unmanned. It can also take high-G turns that no manned aircraft can accomplish.

[Dave Wooley]

Another way is to employ the UCAV as a force multiplier. How this system works is , probably classified.

Dave Wooley

[Werner]

I read recently that the USN is well ahead of the USAF in development of UCAV aircraft. Because of the corporate threat to the fly-boys, the USAF has resisted advances, and the current generation of planes require many more ground support personnel than the USN UCAV.

The Air Force tried earlier this summer to gain control over all unmanned aircraft in the other services. Fortunately, they failed.

[Dave Wooley]

According to reports the parameters of operation are little short of spectacular. Instead of just hours of airborne time using manned aircraft. The UCAV is being developed to stay aloft for days and have a wide combat radius . Just as a matter of interest would the pilots of the UCAV in future need to be trained as pilots in the conventional sense? Or could they qualify on UCAV flight simulators even for carrier operations. Any one know how did they trained a DASH pilot?

Dave Wooley

[Guest]

According to reports the parameters of operation are little short of spectacular. Instead of just hours of airborne time using manned aircraft. The UCAV is being developed to stay aloft for days and have a wide combat radius . Just as a matter of interest would the pilots of the UCAV in future need to be trained as pilots in the conventional sense? Or could they qualify on UCAV flight simulators even for carrier operations. Any one know how did they trained a DASH pilot?

Dave Wooley

Those are not the high performance, swept wing UCAV that you see in the attached pictures. The ones with long loiter times are the ones with long, thin, straight, high efficiency glider wings.

[Guest]

Of course George S Patton, the person whom the trumpeter of American supremacy through military technological supremacy tend to adore, did say he had no wish to live in any era of push button warfare where there is no personal bravery associated with the imposition of will through military acts.

[Devin]

Of course George S Patton, the person whom the trumpeter of American supremacy through military technological supremacy tend to adore, did say he had no wish to live in any era of push button warfare where there is no personal bravery associated with the imposition of will through military acts.

I have to agree with him but not because of the bravery nonsense. If waging war is like playing a video game -- "pilots" in safe rooms thousands of miles from danger -- how much more appealing will the military option be? There's enough war as it is, no sense in making it easier.

[Guest]

The need for personal bravery can be a proxy for the need to consider carefully. The world in general only benefits if war is terrible for both sides. The world overall is likely to suffer terribly if the war is too easy for one side.

[Dave Wooley]

Of course George S Patton, the person whom the trumpeter of American supremacy through military technological supremacy tend to adore, did say he had no wish to live in any era of push button warfare where there is no personal bravery associated with the imposition of will through military acts.

I have to agree with him but not because of the bravery nonsense. If waging war is like playing a video game -- "pilots" in safe rooms thousands of miles from danger -- how much more appealing will the military option be? There's enough war as it is, no sense in making it easier.

I doubt very much that any conflict conducted with machines like UVACs would be any more easier. I guess much the same thoughts had passed through the minds of people witnessing the first use of aircraft in 1914, the use of the machine gun at the Somme or even the U-boat sinking the hapless "three before breakfast" . Because these things are invented it really does't make it any easier, just more clinical.
Dave Wooley

[Guest]

. Because these things are invented it really does't make it any easier, just more clinical.
Dave Wooley

That is easier for a nation that seems no longer incapable of absorbing the level of casualty to itself that is to be expected from a major war with peer power, and yet a major portion of whose population unashamedly revel in gory fantasies of blowing foreigner's heads off of their shoulders.

[Werner]

• • US Army plans robot planes operated by non-pilots
    By Lewis Page
    Published Thursday 29th November 2007 15:58 GMT
    
    Military pilots are up in arms* over US Army plans for substantial, powerful drone combat aircraft to be operated by mere mortals without wings on their chests.
    
    The flying death machines in question are the US Army's new version of the well-known US Air Force Predator. The army's "Sky Warrior" version is a somewhat enlarged variant on the original Predator-A, though not as large and puissant as the Predator-B, aka the "Reaper". A Sky Warrior can carry much less ordnance than a Reaper.
    
    The thing that makes the Sky Warrior different is that it doesn't need a large operating staff of fully-trained human pilots. Ordinary Predators and Reapers are normally handled during landing and takeoff by a qualified pilot on the ground at their operating base in the theatre of war. While flying missions, they are controlled via satellite by different pilots who are normally in America. As the drone planes can stay up for very long periods, these pilots normally work in shifts, requiring even more personnel.
    
    Far from making pilots obsolete, Predator and Reaper type systems actually demand more of them, and plenty of other support personnel too. This may be one reason why air forces - traditionally run by pilots - have been so tolerant of them.
    
    But the US Army has no interest in having lots of pilots. It just wants aircraft overhead doing a job as cheaply as possible. Thus the Sky Warrior can land and take off automatically, and - it seems - will be handled in flight by people without wings on their chests at all.
    
    The Sky Warrior programme is the point at which unmanned aircraft move from being remotely piloted to remotely operated, a key step along the road to being fully autonomous - true killer robots. (Software has already been demonstrated which can handle groups of drones to carry out complex tasks - eg, following a vehicle - with only minimal human supervision.)
    
    Bill Sweetman, doyen of aerospace journalists, attended a recent conference in London on flying killer robots. Most of the attendees were air force types, and unsurprisingly they were angry and worried about the Army plans.
    
    "We're allowed to be in civilian airspace, 1000 feet away from jumbo jets. Who's going to like a non-rated Army officer doing that?" one Predator pilot asked.
    
    "In order to apply lethal force you should be a rated aviator," commented another, referring to the Sky warrior's potential to carry eight Hellfire missiles, each capable of destroying a tank. That said, other things can apply this level of lethal force; for example another tank, often commanded by a lowly, non-aviator corporal in the British Army.
    
    Underlying the aviators' anguish, says Sweetman, is "a real concern that if the Army has got it wrong, a blue-on-blue disaster or a midair will set back the development of UAVs by decades".
    
    Sweetman, a staunch friend of air forces everywhere in the eternal baiting and bureaucratic warfare among armed services, also noted that the only speaker at the conference who approved of the US Army plans was one from General Atomics, makers of the Sky Warrior. (Sweetman spoke himself.)
    
    Of course, pilots don't always prevent disasters. Indeed, in a recent case involving the crash of a Predator-B operated by US Customs, a fully-trained pilot with thousands of hours in the air caused not only the crash but a serious crisis for local air-traffic authorities. It's hard to see how a specialist Army warrant officer would be any more likely to commit this kind of error.
    
    It's also quite hard to see a natural pathway to general rank for such a specialist, of course. In the long term, it's hard to see how such a specialist - if situated in America, as is air force custom if not Army - would seriously need to be a uniformed serviceman rather than a civilian contractor.
    
    It is no disrespect to military pilots to say that unmanned aircraft threaten their jobs: that's just a fact - setting aside pilots who carry passengers, perhaps. It is no disrespect to air forces' bravery or technical competence to say that unmanned combat aircraft in large numbers seriously threaten their status as "warriors" and therefore as uniformed, independent fighting services.
    
    A decades-long setback in unmanned aircraft development would be a good thing for both groups, actually.
    
    Some at least of the pilots and air force people at the conference will be fearing the Sky Warrior force not because it might fail, but because it might succeed.
  Disclaimer: Your correspondent was in both the army and the air force as a reservist before spending a long time in the navy. He has been described by a senior Army officer as "totally unsuited to military life", by various senior naval officers as a traitor to the service, and by his old airforce CO as having "agricultural" piloting skills; though the same long-suffering man eventually gave permission for solo flying.

*Naturally. B'dum, tschh! Oh all right, coat time evidently...

Original URL: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/11/29 ... ne_debate/

[Tracy White]

Of course George S Patton, the person whom the trumpeter of American supremacy through military technological supremacy tend to adore, did say he had no wish to live in any era of push button warfare where there is no personal bravery associated with the imposition of will through military acts.

I have the utmost respect for Patton but I think proponents of these things as a silver bullet miss the fact that you can't hold territory with aircraft. Air Force has been making that mistake since its inception.

That said, I do think these buggers hold some interesting promise. Some of the concepts floated by proponents include "binding" the UCAVs to F-22s with the F-22 operating as a strike leader and the pilot more of a strike manager than active participant. The UCAVs themselves would have a limited programming so that they could respond to threats or continue a set mission if contact is lost with the "mother ship." I would imagine that they would have a complex communications link anyway, encrypted data links operating on bursting transmission to make location of both the mother ship and UCAVS harder.