New Aircraft Is Pilot Optional 76
Zothecula writes "Although the use of unmanned aerial vehicles such as Global Hawk and Raven for military information gathering has increased sharply in the last decade due to the maturation and miniaturization of enabling technologies, conventional piloted aircraft can still be a better option depending on the mission at hand. Northrop Grumman has unveiled a new intelligence gathering aircraft called the Firebird that falls into the category of an Optionally Piloted Vehicle with its ability to be flown robotically or with a human pilot on board."
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:How about cargo UAVs? (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting, about 15 years ago I wrote a short story in which commercial airline pilots were "figureheads". Most had lost what pilot training they had from years of atrophy. The pilot was only there to reassure the passengers that someone could fly the thing if the computers failed, but because the systems were designed for computer control and reflexes, it was pretty much impossible for a human to pilot them anyways.
The aircraft companies were able to take lots of shortcuts in the design of the planes because they could count on computer control to compensate before stress became too great for the airframe to handle, using minute adjustments billions of times a second to keep the planes infrastructure as free of stress as possible.
Ahh.. mid-90's.. when Popular Mechanics was a great source of fiction inspiration.