Heron under retrieval parachute
The Heron Manufactured by Israel Aerospace industries is a 26 M span 1500 kg pilotless vehicle capable of remain aloft for over a day and can deliver high quality real time images in the visual infra red and microwave spectrums.
Powered by a piston engine and cruising at 100 kts it is GPS guided and can take off and land autonomously. There is the option for it to be either pre programmed or remote controlled or a combination of both. Read more…
Predator console
Point. Click. Kill: Inside The Air Force’s Frantic Unmanned Reinvention
The age of remote-control warfare isn’t coming–it’s here, and not even the Air Force, which made it happen, is entirely prepared. Here, a firsthand look at the struggle to train thousands of drone pilots virtually overnight.
Without traffic, it takes Captain Adam Brockshus about 45 minutes to drive from his four-bedroom suburban home outside Las Vegas to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada. His commute follows Highway 95 northwest through a stretch of the Mojave freckled with Joshua trees and flanked by arid mountain ranges. He trains pilots for combat in Iraq and Afghanistan, yet this desolate drive may be the most harrowing part of his job. Tall, blond and new-daddy doughy, Brockshus spends the rest of his day in a windowless room full of office chairs and computer monitors, teaching 20-somethings how to fly war drones 7,500 miles away. Although his is, for all intents, a desk job, it may be one of the most critical posts in today’s Air Force. The number of unmanned aircraft missions has more than tripled in the past two years, and the Air Force can’t train people fast enough to keep up with the demand.
Predator UAV
US F 15 in Afghanistan
U.S. military spokesman Col. Greg Julian said a second fighter aircraft traveling with the jet that went down saw no evidence of enemy fire.
No fighter jets have crashed in Afghanistan in years. Militants are able to shoot down helicopters with rockets, but are not known to have the anti-aircraft weaponry necessary to bring down a high-flying jet.
The military says the F-15E crashed in eastern Afghanistan at about 3:15 a.m. Saturday Kabul time. The military did not immediately say where in Afghanistan the jet crashed. Many areas of eastern Afghanistan, which borders Pakistan, are filled with craggy mountains.
The crash will be investigated by a board of officers, the military said.
Raptor ramps up the G
A letter from Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-Hawaii), chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, to Japan’s ambassador in Washington lists an estimated average unit cost of $290 million per aircraft for a theoretical export sale of 40 F-22 Raptors.
Both Inouye and Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.), chairman of the House defense appropriations subcommittee, and other lawmakers in both chambers are pushing both in public and behind the scenes to allow export of the stealthy, fifth-generation fighter.
It isn’t quite CSAR (Combat Search and Rescue), but it is a start!
U.S. Marines onboard the USS Bataan, an amphibious ship, got a chance to use the tiltrotor for the medical
evacuation of a sailor on June 25.
The ship ordered two Ospreys enroute back to the ship after a mission to fly at max speed. Once onboard, the sailor, who sustained hip injuries and chest pains after falling, was loaded up. Some medical support equipment was also flown, as shown in the pics. The sailor was then flown 147 naut. mi. in 37 min to a regional airport and then transferred via ambulance to a hospital for more medical attention, the Marines say.
The V-22 has been an on-again/off-again candidate for the USAF Combat Search and Rescue-X (CSAR-X) competition.
Nothing like the endorsement of a customer to try and prove a point. Of course on this mission there was no shooting or searching, but it shows that the speed and versatility of the aircraft are an asset for medical evacuation missions.
The news release of the mission came in the midst of a re-emergence of criticism from lawmakers of the aircraft’s cost and reliability.
From http://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense
USS Nimitz
I was excited. Who would turn down a chance to get on top of a nuclear power plant driving 100,000 tons of steel through the ocean, with 5,000 men and women handling scores of aircraft, carrying thousands of pounds of bombs and missiles, burning thousands of gallons of jet fuel a day, with margins measured in inches, and tolerances of seconds? What could possibly go wrong? Read more…
An insidious changes in recent times in Military aviation has been the advent of Unmanned aircraft. Pilots sit at desks on one continent flying remote drones on another. These can and do launch missiles that can wreak enormous damage. The pilot then goes home to his dinner and watches TV or does his chores. There is the potential here to fundamentally change the nature of warefare with some very unpleasant consequences such as the further dehumanisation of the “target”.
Just imagine how easy it may become to make a decision to bomb a village in Afghanistan because the choice is seen as eliminating a risk to “our boys over there” with on the one hand the saving of noble souls fighting for freedom to be balanced against on the other hand the unavoidable collateral loss of some Ethnic non-combatants.
There is now a proliferating multitude of both big small and in between unmanned vehicles.
Maybe it is now time for some more general discussion of what is being done in our name on the battlefields of the world.
As an example of the capability now being offered consider the KillerBee® Unmanned Aircraft System offered by Ratheon. Read more…
WASHINGTON – The Senate Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee is considering requiring the U.S. Air Force to study the viability of creating an export version of the Lockheed Martin Corp F-22 fighter jet, a source closely following the issue told Reuters on Monday.
“There may be language inserted into the fiscal 2010 appropriations bill that would at least look at the
possibility,” said the source, who asked not to be identified since the legislative language is still being finalized.
In a letter to the editor of The Peoples Defender Rick Kenny a spokesperson for GE strongly defends the GE Rolls project . Read more…
Despite being cut from the Pentagon’s budget, the GE Aviation/Rolls-Royce F136 engine is progressing toward flight testing.
The companies said Wednesday that it is beginning its flight clearance certification review, a process that will prepare the F136 for flight testing. It expects that, following certification, the engine will be tested on an F-35 Lightning aircraft in early 2011.
Read more…