Fly And Land X-47B UCAS Aircraft With A Mouse Click

All of you must have heard or read about the drones. For those who are unaware of these awesome flyers, drones are classified as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (AUV) and are being effectively used for spying and reconnaissance operations by the US Air Force in the Middle Eastern countries like Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, etc. These drones can carry cameras and weapons which can be used to wipe out terrorist camps by carrying out destructive air raids. The main advantage that these drones have is that they are smaller and require lesser fuel and no pilot is sitting in the cockpit. As a result, there is no loss of human life in case a mission fails. However, these planes are not 100% unmanned. Actually, the more appropriate term for these aircrafts is “remotely piloted”. The reason for saying so is that the drones are controlled by a soldier or controller helps the drone in its actual flight. So you must be aware of basic aerodynamics and aero modeling for controlling a drone. But the US Navy has come up with a new aircraft which is completely unmanned and any person can control it with the help of a mouse click!

#-Link-Snipped-#The X-47B killer drone is the first unmanned to fly off an aircraft carrier. This latest avionic masterpiece is manufactured by Northrop Grumman especially for the navy. This tailless, triangular aircraft was unveiled by the Navy and Northrop in Washington at the Navy League’s annual Sea Air Space convention.

Janis Pamiljans, the Northrop vice president who is in charge of this particular project and the Unmanned Combat Air System Demonstration (UCAS-D) division of the company and Capt. Jaime Engdahl were present at the press conference. They asserted the fact that the X-47B is not remotely piloted. There is absolutely no need of a pilot to control it with a joystick. One can simply use a mouse to dictate the flight parameters to this aircraft and the aircraft will take off and land at the exact location. The drone completed its first flight in February this year. The Navy is now planning to make it take off and land on a moving aircraft carrier ship. Capt. Jaime Engdahl pointed out that landing on a carrier is very difficult as it is a highly precise job to land on a floating air strip. The algorithm written for the automatic flight of this plane requires only push buttons to control it. The program or software coding required about 3.4 million lines of codes to make it fully functional.

The engines will get turned on with a mouse click. One more mouse click will take the drone to taxi. Give one more click, and the X-47B will soar into the sky. The scientists have taken a lot of efforts to get this plane going. However, the development has fallen behind schedule. By mid 2013, the experiments involving simulations and actual landing tests using Nimitz class carriers at river Pautuxent will be carried out to make the drone and carrier compatible. The engineers will be testing out everything including launch operations, landings, datalink downloading, etc. The final frontier before the commissioning of the drones will be the mid air refueling capability. Let’s hope that the plane becomes fully operational as soon as possible. Some people have already started getting the goose bumps by just thinking about Skynet like machines which fire at their own will. What do you think about these drones?
Do check out the first flight video:



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