Science Navy Drone Makes First Aircraft Carrier Landing

[N_Molson]

Navy Drone Makes First Aircraft Carrier Landing


By Megan Gannon, News Editor
Date: 10 July 2013 Time: 05:15 PM ET
LIVESCIENCE


A robotic drone made military history today (July 10) with its first unmanned landing on a moving aircraft carrier at sea, U.S. Navy officials said.

An X-47B plane nicknamed "Salty Dog 502" touched down on the USS George H.W. Bush, off the coast of Virginia, in a so-called arrested landing, a maneuver designed for making a quick stop on a flight deck. With no tail and a wide wingspan of more than 62 feet (19 meters), the Navy's robotic Top Gun resembles — and has been mistaken for — a flying saucer.

"Landing on a carrier's flight deck is one of the most challenging tasks for a naval aviator — one that takes extensive training and regular practice to perfect," Jaime Engdahl, program manager for the Navy's Unmanned Combat Air System, wrote in a blog post ahead of the demonstration.

Today's feat follows the success of X-47B's earlier tests at sea, including nine touch-and-go landings aboard the USS George H. W. Bush in May, in which the plane would touch down on the runway without coming to a full stop before taking off again. The plane, which is made by Northrop Grumman, also completed arrested landings on a mock flight deck on land ahead of today's milestone.

While the X-47B itself is not intended to go into operational use, military officials hope the technology will lead to a future fleet of carrier-capable drones that can replace or serve alongside fighter jets.

"It isn't very often you get a glimpse of the future. Today, those of us aboard USS George H.W. Bush got that chance as we witnessed the X-47B make its first ever arrested landing aboard an aircraft carrier," Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said in a statement. "The operational unmanned aircraft soon to be developed have the opportunity to radically change the way presence and combat power are delivered from our aircraft carriers."

 

[IronRain]

 

[Belisarius]

I, for one, welcome our new robotic overlords

 

[Spacethingy]

Stupid question, is that fully automatic (as in a proper autonomous robot) or is that remote controlled? Because if that's fully autonomous, that's an incredible point for the argument in favour of pilotless airliners.

 

[Urwumpe]

Stupid question, is that fully automatic (as in a proper autonomous robot) or is that remote controlled? Because if that's fully autonomous, that's an incredible point for the argument in favour of pilotless airliners.

It seems to be autononous: The aircraft guides itself, but the human operator can control the automatic functions.

 

[boogabooga]

I hope this technology is used wisely.

 

[Belisarius]

Depends what you mean by wisely.

 

[Urwumpe]

Depends what you mean by wisely.

Land flying gigantic combat robots automatically in terrorist camps.

 

[Belisarius]

Gosh I sure hope they actually know where the terrorist camps are, because occasionally they make mistakes and send the killer robots to blow up a school.

 

[Urwumpe]

Gosh I sure hope they actually know where the terrorist camps are, because occasionally they make mistakes and send the killer robots to blow up a school.

All had been suspected of terrorism. Especially the elementary school students. Now, where is Southpark...

 

[Belisarius]

Just did a little checking and of course this is nothing like the first automated landing on an aircraft carrier.

This occurred in 1963 on the CV Midway, using a modified F4 Phantom.

http://thanlont.blogspot.com.es/2011/07/look-no-hands.html

I wonder how much the 1963 system cost in relation to this fantastic new 2013 model.

 

[Urwumpe]

I would not so much care for the costs, then the capability... the 1963 system required pretty calm sea to work at all and was still pretty unreliable on better weather, the F/A-18 was the first plane to have an autoland system that was useful for typical operations. But still, it is a difference, if a pilot sits in the plane and observes the activity from inside, or if you sit under the deck of a carrier and just see what the UAV tells you.

 

[MattBaker]

Wasn't there a rule in the US Armed Forces that you don't use autolanding because it could theoretically be disturbed by enemies in case of war?

Which would pretty much make this whole project useless.

 

[Capt_hensley]

Radio guided anything had "rules" that were supposed to prevent or avoid enemy interception and disruption of operations.

As I recall it got thrown out with electronic warfare, which imposed certian provisions and requirements to encrypt any control signal for radio equipped operations.

It's also one of the reasons White Sands gave up a large chunk of radio freqs and returned them for FCC civilian use. The freqs were previously used for radio control of incomming and outgoing guided objects, and network communications. Modern encryption and multiplexing at higher freqs made the lower channels obsolete.

 

[Belisarius]

Any idea what went wrong with the CIA's RQ170 in Iran in 2011?

 

[Urwumpe]

Any idea what went wrong with the CIA's RQ170 in Iran in 2011?

Simplest idea? A combination of GPS and communication jammers. One alone shouldn't do it, but two combined could make the UAV follow fake GPS signals. The equipment is not even large to do that, since the GPS signals are very weak. This would also sabotage the idea to use INS as primary navigation source. You see six good and healthy GPS satellites, which send you pseudo range-signals which suggests that you are 5 km away from your desired location, resynchronize your INS, and fly 5 km away from where you should be from that point on... until you are out of range of the jammers.

 

[Belisarius]

The US engineers said it wasn't GPS hacking because the drone uses primary INS guidance. They said that a GPS hack would have been overridden by the INS program.

 

[Urwumpe]

The US engineers said it wasn't GPS hacking because the drone uses primary INS guidance. They said that a GPS hack would have been overridden by the INS program.

Yes, but that isn't how INS works. INS starts to ignore regular GPS updates, once the GPS signals indicate problems and tries to resume GPS updates, when the GPS signals are good enough again.

You could switch manually to a pure inertial mode, but this would give you quickly increasing position errors. Such a UAV does usually not carry a heavy high precision INS, like some ICBMs do. The INS should work for maybe 100 NM, not more. And how to switch to pure inertial mode, when the space-comm link is jammed?

Also you could reject satellites not emitting P-code signals, but this would again only be a temporary measure. The USA have no WAAS over Iran, so they have no source for WAAS data to assist in telling bad GPS signals apart.