Happy Monday, everyone. Let’s start this short week right with this video of an unmanned version of Boeing’s Little Bird chopper landing on the back of a moving flatbed truck. As you know, the Little Bird is one of the military’s smallest helos. Images of special operators being dropped off by Little Birds in the middle of narrow city streets have become ubiquitous.
Boeing has been working on fielding the unmanned version of the chopper that can be used to do almost all the missions a manned little bird can, ISR, light strike even cargo hauling for years now. Heck we’ve seen Lockheed and Kaman team up to deliver an unmanned version of the K-MAX light helo to the Marines for resupply duty in Afghanistan.
The drone-chopper in the video below is using a THALES-built automatic landing system that allows it to sense how far away it is from the truck’s moving deck .
Drone Choppers for France:
Now why does the unmanned chopper need to land on moving targets? Because Boeing is developing the chopper for use by the French Navy, where it will be operated from ships in a similar way the U.S. Navy flies soon-to-be-armed MQ-8 Fire Scout drone helos from its ships. (I heard Boeing execs mention this project during a briefing at the Association of the U.S. Army’s annual conference in Washington in September and it piqued my interest then.) The Little Bird is set to conduct sea trials aboard a French frigate in 2012.
Click through the jump for the video:
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{ 61 comments… read them below or add one }
I'm wondering, is this just an initial test, or are landings going to be taking place at such a low speed?
Ships don't go too fast…
25-29 knots for the French frigates is pretty good speed.
You don't generally do air ops with your helos at that speed. Generally you are pretty much going sub 15knots.
Hopefully these things will be so good and take off and landing that air operations can be done while the ship is at high speed, maybe even turning. That would be pretty awesome, but for now just doing what the human pilot does it pretty impressive.
They actually go faster in reverse
Sorry to resort to what is basically spam, but I'm honestly fed up with that crap :
"There have been 53 major wars in Europe
France had been a belligerent in 49 of them.
In 185 battles that France had fought over the past 800 years, their armies had won 132 times, lost 43 times and drawn only 10.
Giving the French military the best record of any country in world."
BBC History"
Just one thing, the new wave french-bashing and the whole 'cheese-eating surrender monkey' started in 2003 as a politically expedient psy-op. Looking back at it, with 2011's hindsight, doesn't it strike anybody not blinded by ideological bias as the height of irony?
The USA out of iraq (iran's new best pal) not with a bang but with a whimper, karzai sponging off Us money but buddying up with pakistan,16 trillions debt, the keyboard warriors and masculinity-challenged internet tough guys whining about afghanistan… Hell *barack* *hussein* *obama* as a president,… What a joke, what a waste.
Don't get me wrong, I genuinely respect the american people (not the blowhard french-bashers from the "red meat" internet, though, who can go choke on their corndog), but… you've been led down the garden path, as a Nation, by hucksters wrapped in the flag. You've been had.
To the fellows like the 'guest' above, go on with your circle-jerk about the french, still won't change the fact about who got ultimately shafted by a bunch of crooks, and will have to deal with that for a long time.
Ship don't go much faster than 25 MPH and usualy cruse as 15 MPH, and that truck was not going much over 20MPH.
I had just posted above that the French Frigates go 25-29 knots. Thats around 29-33mph. The Arleigh Burkes do upwards of 30 knots, around 35mph. Even the Mistral class can do 18 knots. So be specific, which ships don't go much faster than 25mph? The ones that these are being designed for certainly do.
yeah…but they can slow down right? And those are top speeds, not max-range/economy speeds ("slow-stearning")
I'm pretty sure those ships can slow down for aircraft operations. Bigger question would be sea conditions and especially crosswinds, etc. That speed could go right up to 50 mph + in the right wind conditions (but that's relative airspeed, so who knows?).
if i was the ComOp i’d prefer a highly accurate landing in adverse weather rather than a sprint let’s see how fast this sucker hits the deck approach.
and night IR landings work for me too.
They named the trailer the USS Hardesty
Yea ok……
Keep the drivers …….
driving from the front seat…..
Nice! Now, do it again in a brownout…
You know that electronic sensors are much better at seeing through a brownout right? Also they don't rely on just there eyes for position location (GPS and/or inertial navigation) which means they can land completely blind as long as they know where the pad is and where they where when they started
In a brownout a pilot only has his instruments to rely on in order to land.. a computer could read and react to those readings much faster then a human could.
Have it any advantage over maned?. (I mean that kind of UAV converted from maned)
male lions are maned. piloted vehicles are manned.
1) If you drop the pilots from this bird you can drop in 6 operators instead of 4 per bird.
2) If you cropped off the cockpit you could be looking at a weight savings of as much as 1500lbs (Including the loss of pilots). That's lots of extra fuel, munitions, or both.
Don't re-invent the wheel each time, take the birds you have, make a few airframe shape design changes (Remove the people box), put in some extra sensors and a extra cool flight computer and there is your drone.
i think one of the selling points was that its supposed to be remote controled and man controled. Not one or the other
You go first… having "flown" UAVs for the USAF I would not want to be on board one that went lost link to the control station, had a serious mechanical malfunction or two or had a situation that required quick thinking and lots of SA on the part of the flight crew…
Not saying UAVs should not be a reasonable part anyone's fleet but they really aren't the end all be all of future aviation…
Besides being a human on a UAV would entail significant radiation hazards believe it or not from the high power data link systems… when the links are on I would stay at least 25 feet away from any UAV with BLOS capability…
UAV does not always mean teleoperated. In fact I am petty sure this is a demostation of autonomous flight not teleoperated flight (I could be wrong as it's short on detail). For example the now not new Boeing 777 has the ability to fly autonomous flight starting from standing start on any runway to an stop at the end of any other runway. I have been on a number of 777 flights that where operated just like this (I admit there was a pilot on board but he was completely unnecessary) The newer systems can even take directions via audio from Air traffic controllers. I could easily see a system that flies itself and takes verbal directions from operators on the ground or riding on the bird.
It works only when everything works and works as planned… I'm telling you the intersection of everything is fine, everything is going as planned, everything works and is as capable as advertised and everything is as easy as I said it would be is a very small corner of the world of aviation…
I doubt also taking out the flightcrew on the Little Bird to get two extra operators is the best route, just get a bigger helicopter… it sounds like desperation… besides, going UAV means BLOS bandwith with at least dual links for redundancy with human cargo (expensive, not necessarily easily attainable, and again carries its own cost and limitations), another sophisticated piece of equipment to buy, service and maintain – your ground control stations (LRE / MCE), you'll need a good swath of contractors to keep that LRE / MCE working and you'll actually need more flightcrew as UAVs fly much longer (that being their strongest trait)
Not completely dismissing UAVs – they do somethings WAY better than manned platforms but they are not without serious costs or limitations…
The only time I could see such a system in use is commonizing manned/unmanned platforms. Then if you need to move stuff with a pilot and have plenty of Common Helicopters sitting around, you won't be screwed like you would if you had no Manned Helicopters and only Unmanned Helicopters.
However, we would be paying good money for such a infrequently-occuring scenario. Good idea?
I think you are still assuming teleoperated systems. There is really no need for a pilot (on board or not) for a very very very large number of missions. This particular system is being designed for sea use. It would be very very very simple to program an autonomous system to play follow the leader, or orbit, or any number of we tell you where to go and you go there scenarios. (Similar to the global hawk that does not rely on ground control to fly its mission).
The issue here is that the assumption is that a pilot can fly the aircraft better than a computer, but it's just not true anymore. The computer is fare more accurate, has no fear, and has significantly better reaction time than any person. Do you want the computer to choose who to fire upon? No. Do you want the computer to fly the aircraft? Well most modern aircraft you have no choose, the pilot is only telling the computer what they want the air-frame to do, the computer flies the air-frame. I am just saying that we don't really need a pilot on board to do that, it's really just tradition and peoples irrational fear that makes us do it. 100 years ago people would have freaked out at an autonomous elevator, today I bet most people don't know they used to take a trained operator.
Don´t enought. i think it can be a good tech demostrator of big aircraft unmaned control but i do not see utility. Nor more room as you see trough glass nor weight saves. I belive the only usefull thing about it´s put off pilots itself. Save money in training, tri-care, pension, pay and relatives. More ideas , please.
I'm sure we have thousands of these from the Viet Nam era. Wonder why we can't just retrofit a bunch like this instead of spending billions on R&D for the newer heli drones they developing… Without pilots, seems like you could displace that weight with extra gear or fuel.
That assumes the airframes still have enough hours on them to be worth refitting.
Easier to beef 'em up than designing an entirely new airframe from the ground up. Look at our Fleet of B-52s…
You mean the fleet that the air force has been trying to replace for years now due to the airframe being so old and worn out?
Its a good idea to "recycle" old equipment, but sometimes it'll cost more in the long run then just building new ones.
Totally different aircraft. H-6 is based on a 369FF with upgraded transmission, main rotor, and a lot bigger engine. Max gross weight is half again what the OH-6 was.
I have a hard time imagining a navalized little bird doing the kind of spec ops things that we're used to seeing little birds doing.
But it would be useful for doing Cargo on demand, and running around with a dipping sonar and a torpedo or two.
Actually little birds were very effectively used against Iran when they mined the Persian Gulf in the 80's. Little Birds took video of them doing it. Attacked the minelayers and fastboats and provided air support for special ops guys raiding oil well platforms.
Very cool, but what happens if hackers get a hold of these unmanned systems?
cyberarms.wordpress.com/2011/11/02/drone-wars-when-cyber-war-becomes-real/
Others have modded you down here, but I think you have a good point. We have to be worried that not only could ground control stations we compromised but so could the system we use to maintain and program the autonomous system be compromised. There is a lot of worry about counterfeit systems making it into the DOD/Govt supply chains. These items can be pre-compromised in all kinds of ways. Then there is the worry of the inside job (A very large number of hacks come from inside jobs, at one point it was estimated over 85%). There are a number of things that can be done to help prevent this, HASHing systems and other origin and integrity checks can be made on code and chips, but it had to be done very thoroughly and regularly to be useful at all. Don't let the naysayers here get you down, keep pointing out cyber security. It's important.
That 85% comes from user error, not treason or infiltration.
You are 100% correct. Mostly it's either users not protecting there data, or social engineering, but I think you might be surprised at the number of people willing to hack their own employers systems for fun and profit.
Having once ridden on the outside of an H-6 many moons ago I can say it took all the faith I had in airpower to ride on a manned MH-6. Shipboard anti pirate ops sure, but not as a means to infil operators.
Cool tech though.
This is too cheap. Can't we add a few 100-billions to make this really DoD-interesting?
Thats why we aren't buying it.
Overall it is not fair play unmaned vs maned. Man+his brain it is a multi task system. Example: A seal wrote in a book about vietnam what his platoon dog spooky VC, was agressive and good tracking, better than seals but in whole "doings" for their patrols dog was useless. So as Curtis say thus missions can be fullfiled by UAV.
Horses have manes. So these helis don't have manes. As in maneless. Do you mean unmanned?
I'm pretty sure you knew what tribulationtime meant.
Yes in spanish we say "manos", for human too.
I think the part you are missing is that an unmanned platform has a few advantages over a manned platform. The first is the risk to the pilot. That UAV can go more into harms way than the manned bird can. The unmanned pilot doesn't have to worry as much about hostile fire. The other part is that if the bird does get shotdown or crash, then it can either be a vehicle recovery or demolition mission instead of a Search and Rescue or worse, a POW/MIA issue.
It would be better to distinguish between teleoperated and autonomous machines.
It's SEAL not seal, as in Navy SEAL. A Navy SEAL is a highly trained operator that's trained to operate in/from Sea Air & Land, hence the acronym SEAL. A seal is a marine pineped that's closely related to the sea lion and eats fish, squid, some species prey on penguins and are not highly trained Naval commando.
Interestingly enough, seals, the mammal you mentioned above, some of them are being used to do one of the jobs of the Navy SEALS. They can go out and find mines, along with the ability to help retrieve Navy equipment that goes haywire.
Hello I don´t speak english. I know that. But by example if you can correct me by spelling seal instead of SEAL. Please forgive me and If you are not agree with me argue with reassons. Or not. Choose it
In American english, seal denotes a water dwelling mammal, SEAL is an acronym that denotes a highly trained military operator of the American Naval forces. They are spelled differently to denote which one the writer is intending to write about.
Your english isn't great but the meaning comes across, good job!
Have a great day
My two cents is:
I can see the point of an aircraft without a pilot. No human occupant frees up space and reduces systems dramatically . The craft can fly for days. It can take turns that will make a pilot pass out. So there are good reasons to take pilots out of a plane
Pilot-less helicopters?
Sure for the Navy which wants to put really small helicopters on all their small boats to add carrier protections; ASW; small boat defense and surveillance capabilities.
The Marines could use them to hang over units which know they are exposed. (beach landings) .They would be no good for units trying to be stealthy, the helicopter would give away their location.
So I see a need for them in the Navy, possibly Marines. Due to space constraints.
Besides that, why would you take the pilot out? The craft will not be flying for long time periods. They don't have the range. Save weight? Sure, but you are adding a lot of complexity. Add maneuverability? Not so much…..
I think it is a technological dead end……
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I honestly look at some of the great disasters the French Military has had as my barometer for teasing the french. I look at the Battles of the Nile and Trafalgar first. Trafalgar was so bad that Napoleon made a decree that French Navy Officer were not to be called sir from that day forth. Then I look at their defeats first in World War 2, and then later at Dien Bien Phu. If it weren't for the Brits and then us in the First World War, they probably would have been defeated by the Germans there too. They may have a good win/loss record, but when they lose it tends to be horrific.
Ed, we're not talking about a cheeky "teasing" of the french military history or a reasoned critique of France, we talking about drones repeating ad nauseam the "surrender" meme, to an absurd, mechanical level, and France downgraded as a strawman counter-model and a quasi 'ennemy' of the US 'interests' (defined as being what's politically expedient for the oligarchs who have hijacked the whole thing… give me the USA, land of the brave and the free individuals, over these thieves anytime).
You mentioned WWI (interesting that you decouple GB from France, there) and Indochina, fine, what do these tell you about the "white flag", "rifle never fired only dropped", "surrender at the first opportunity",… slurs? Thinks it's fitting for the french men who fought and died there? Even the 1940 battle of France would be 750 000 2011 US military KIA in 4 weeks (with the germans losing half of their planes and a third of their tanks btw).. fitting to make fun of them, to turn them into an abstraction to stroke one's ego?
You have to admit that there battle record over the last 75 years or so has been pretty bad. Before that they where a real world power, and you have to wonder where most Americans where in history class when they talked about the Napoleonic wars. I think it's foolish, short sighted and a grave mischaracterisation of the facts to suggest the French Military sucks, but it's not what it used to be that's for sure.
Preach on Brother!! American's love a took 1 line talking point doesn't matter how much of a mischaracterisation of the truth it is. We as a Nation need to wake up and stop letting talking points rule us, we need facts as complicated and dirty as they are and we need to work with those things understanding that we are not all the same, compromise is OK, and people are more important than money. Maybe then we can get somewhere.
No I tend to make fun of the leadership that got them into such catastrophes in the first place. The Battle of France, the French fought based on the lessons learned from WW1 but never fully understood the new style of armored tactics. The french tanks were superior in firepower and numbers to the Germans. The germans used better tactics. Also the German tanks were panzer 2s and 3s. Look at their losses to the Russians, especially when they first met the KV-1.
"Even the 1940 battle of France would be 750 000 2011 US military KIA in 4 weeks (with the germans losing half of their planes and a third of their tanks btw).. "
lol what?
"and has significantly better reaction time than any person."
Depends on what they're reacting to. If it's an incoming SAM and there's a self defense program, then probably yes. Pre-programmed maneuvers will probably be faster than a human at the controls making the same decision. However, a pilot with his hands on the stick will move the bird a fraction of a second faster than someone at the controls from a ground station. There's also a slight delay if the bird is operated via satellite link instead of line of sight radio.
I flew the Global Hawk for several years, there was not a single mission where a pilot(s) were not in the ground control shelter (LRE or MCE) at all times either directly giving commands to the air vehicle or monitoring it, on normal landings and takeoffs both shelters were occupied for redundancy with back up pilots at the nearby Operations Center for additional backup and mission duties. It is technically possible to allow the air vehicle to operate autonomously but it really just not done, so someone is at the controls at al times for safety, assurance of control and prediction of behavior, if you don't have that I guarantee you that no aviation authority (domestic or foreign will ever let you fly in their airspace) – possibly a moot point in a military operation but unless it is openly declared hostilities or you have to use someone else's airspace to get to you objective area, it could be huge
I think you are taking the idea of giving it a simple land, orbit, turn, etc. command far too simply by assuming conditions at every single time it will be required to execute that command will be, similar enough to either it's programmed routine or experienced situations to then translate to it's current conditions, i.e. that every maneuver wherever it is commanded will be quickly understood by the computer and executed correctly with SA and common sense on all the things that are going on around it, the unique conditions for where it is, etc… building SA into this system is going to be one monumental task because it is basically recognizing when to make exceptions or to break-bend-obey the rules, how to prioritize, etc… context recognition is very very difficult in AI… it is one thing to land a 777 at a known and very well surveyed airport with all the data built into the aircraft's nav and guidance systems with a ground based ILS and WAAS to guide it to a great landing and another to execute a landing at a random location with random conditions (both external and internal) and all sorts of other factors (mission priorities vs safety of flight, etc…)