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Posted on 03/07/2014 9:47:19 AM PST by Paul46360
Just 5 months ago ( July 10, 2013 ) the Navy successfully conducted take-offs and landings from a fairly new nuclear aircraft carrier, the USS George H.W. Bush, with a new stealth jet called the X-47B.
What is so different about this plane is the fact that it is a 'drone'. Yes, it is completely unmanned. Drones come in all sizes, and the X-47B is likely one of the larger ones.
Note that this aircraft is stealth, meaning the enemy cannot detect a plane like this in the first place. In the unlikely event they get lucky at shooting one down, there will be no human loss of life or captivity.
As you view the flight deck crew signaling the plane, they are simply signaling the on-board cameras, which in turn are being manned by staff inside the command intelligence center ( CIC ) on board the ship
Although I'm an Air Force vet..anything plane is my cup of tea...
You can always detect them. It depends on from what aspect angle, what elevation, what frequency and waveforms you use, and whether you are looking for them.
“You can always detect them...”
Yes, you can. I hate it when I see a stealth or LO platform described as “invisible.” Detection range and reaction delay are what LO accomplishes. Basically, you see them finally but it’s too late to do anything about it by then.
The day will come when drones are the MOST HATED AND MOST FEARED thing in the skies above us.
OK...that’s cool. Even impressed an old Army vet.
I was impressed with the apparently perfect landing. Maybe several landings were done but only the best left to air after editing? Most pilots don’t hit the 2-wire perfect, dead center without some bounce. Either there is some computer controlled approach and landing synced with the ship or the keyboard driver jockey has been playing this video game a long time.
The target wire is the three wire.
I trust you are right and stand corrected. Was it always the case? Didn't earlier carriers have 4 wires?
I was told by a Navy vet that computer controlled landing systems for carriers are so precise that they have to program in variability or the poundings of the aircraft at the same impact point will damage the flight deck at that spot.
A friend of mine was an A-6 Intruder Driver for the Marines. He had to qualify on carrier landings during training. I asked him once about how they score landings. As I recall, he didn’t care how “they” scored them. Any landing that resulted with the plane stopped on the flight deck, in one piece, was “perfect”.
I was referring to totally remote controlled landings. As for hands-on, a Nam vet P-2 driver told me that from the sky, his carrier looked like a postage stamp. When I asked him what a night landing was like, he said “an invisible postage stamp.”
One of my old bosses is involved in this program.
Yep, amazing. Entirely autonomous, except for the taxiing on the flight deck. That was the guys with the joy sticks you saw near the beginning doing the taxiing. But I understand they’re working on that too.
Can you imagine all the lines of code it took to do a carrier landing? What would be more interesting is at night during heavy weather.
A pilot friend described to me the difference between a good landing and a great landing. A good landing is one from which you can walk away. A great landing is if the airplane can take off again.
Nice
Hmmm. I have plenty of carrier time as an aircrewman but I’ve never heard of a P-2 trapping aboard.
P-2s were launched early in their service, doing RATO-boosted deck runs. But they couldn’t trap back aboard.
He probably meant Stoofs ...
Iirc carriers these days only employ three wires normally, rather than four.
The Ford Class was designed from the outset with only three wires.
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I know he flew P-2s & P-3s, I assumed the P-2 was the carrier-based duty. Apparantly not. What ASW plane was flown from carriers during VN? That would have to be it.
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