First Successful Unmanned Drone Landing On an Aircraft Carrier

redletterdave writes "Salty Dog 502 flew from the Patuxent River Naval Station in Maryland to the USS George H.W. Bush operating off the Virginian coast, but unlike other drones, Salty Dog was piloted entirely by computer without a human operator. The unmanned operation is considered one of the most difficult operations due to navigating the air and a moving ship, and many have said it's a major milestone in the development of drone warfare. Navy Secretary Ray Mabus described the event as witnessing the future and compared it to the first manned aircraft landed on a carrier in 1911."

guiding system

[Dorianny]

The real question in my opinion is what kind of guiding system do the drones use. Flying by radar guidance is something that we have been doing for a long time, surface to air or air to air missiles use it to lock on a stay on target, unfortunately flying with active radar turned on you are putting a bullseye on yourself that makes it trivial for a enemy with any kind of air defenses to easily track it and shoot it down. Flying with visual guidance is considerably harder (by visual guidance I don't mean simply terrain contour matching to figure out its current location like the tomahawk). Most don't appreciate just how fast the human brain is in quickly figuring out and processing relevant information in the insane amount of visual data that enters our retinas every instant. Computers are nowhere near as good yet.