US Navy robot stealth fighter in first unmanned carrier landings

Now they should work on getting rid of the meat from the carrier as well.

What about AEW?

Surely a potentially even greater use of unmanned carrier aircraft would be a replacement for the E2? With no crew to rotate, more fuel capacity and the possibility of unmanned aerial refuelling a carried could potentially keep its radar coverage on station for days at a time. Indeed - it could be manned around the clock from land bases and free up a few bunks...

What is so new about this?

Autopilots have been landing on carriers forever. As a matter of fact our dynamics and controls professor at the university told us they had to program in an error because the autopilot was so good that the catching hook made a huge groove on the deck from landing on the same precise spot all the damn time.

Oh I've been waiting for this moment

The next time I'm up against some flyboy trying to cock-block me with tales of carrier landings. i'm gonna say ' Big deal, my phone can do that now'

One step closer to forever,

Haldeman eat your heart out!

Thought for the Day

Is this surprising, not really, Carrier Auto-land is nothing new, F-4 Phantoms had it in the '60s.

However, UAVs are currently flavour of the month with the politicians because it reduces the likelihood of casualties to your own side because they're not in the plane, at the same time they require large amounts of bandwidth to transmit all the data back to wherever to allow someone to make a decision.

The answer to the latter problem is autonomous UAVs which do all the decision making themselves. The question is, will any politician outside of an all out war let that happen? Certainly in the Vietnam war when the US forces had the capability to destroy enemy aircraft before they could be seen this was deemed unacceptable and you had to have visual confirmation of the target's identity before firing. So despite having spent $Billions developing a capability and doctrine to kill the enemy at range the pilots were forced to close to a position where they were at a disadvantage before they could open fire. You saw a similar thing with the Osama operation where Barrack Obama had a real time video feed of the operation, giving him the ultimate long screwdriver to interfere with the mission.

Ultimately I can't see politicians accepting a drone making decisions about targeting, especially if there's no way to interfere. The problem is if they've already replaced all the piloted aircraft with drones to save money that could leave them defenceless.

Carrier Nonsense

All of this ignores the decreasing, rapidly decreasing, survivability of aircraft carriers. Within a procurement generation - 10 to 15 years - no carrier will have a combat life expectancy sufficient to justify its exposure to enemy contact/interdiction. What the Japanese did to the Prince of Wales and Repulse in 15 minutes in 1942 the Somalis will be able to do the Nimitz, Reagan etc in 2030 and God help the poor Queen Elizabeth.(I won't mention the name of her sister ship out of sensitivity to people's feelings) which will be sailing with none of the protection the US can give to its carriers.

The same could be said to apply to fast jets. Their development, build and deployment costs continue to outstretch the costs of killing them to the extent that purposeful affordability has almost disappeared.

So, how do we apply our technology in a way that is effective, durable and affordable?

We build or take up from trade, cheap general purpose ships, harden them a bit ("militarise" them) and use helicopters to launch and recover UAVs. As a refinement of launching we could use catapults in a similar way CAM merchantmen launched single use Hurricanes in WW2 leaving just recovery to helicopter capture.

In this way we can have lots of drones on lots of ships doing lots of different things all very cheaply and in an eminently scalable fashion in the event of conflict.

(Some fleeting Googling reveals a lot of weapon systems (examples I found include the Bushmaster and Goalkeeper systems) are already containerised and suited to deployment on temporary "warships",)

This is an affordable war fighting future where brains, imagination and adaptability (I know, not noted British qualities) and not money will rule.

Carrier Nonsense - The Sequel

I know, it was 1941. Couldn't find an Edit button. Sorry for the carelessness. (It also took a little longer than 15 minutes to polish off the PoW - a totally new ship commissioned only a few years earlier and already the victim of a seeing-to by the Bismarck) - and her much older consort, Repulse but I was trying to make a point about vulnerability.)