More Drone Porn: NatGeo chimes in [Archive]

FuzzyLumpkins

02-18-2013, 06:12 PM

The Drones Come Home

Unmanned aircraft have proved their prowess against al Qaeda. Now they’re poised to take off on the home front. Possible missions: patrolling borders, tracking perps, dusting crops. And maybe watching us all?

By John Horgan
Photograph by Joe McNally

A law signed by President Barack Obama in February 2012 directs the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to throw American airspace wide open to drones by September 30, 2015. But for now Mesa County, with its empty skies, is one of only a few jurisdictions with an FAA permit to fly one. The sheriff ’s office has a three-foot-wide helicopter drone called a Draganflyer, which stays aloft for just 20 minutes.

The Falcon can fly for an hour, and it’s easy to operate. “You just put in the coordinates, and it flies itself,” says Benjamin Miller, who manages the unmanned aircraft program for the sheriff ’s office. To navigate, Johnson types the desired altitude and airspeed into the laptop and clicks targets on a digital map; the autopilot does the rest. To launch the Falcon, you simply hurl it into the air. An accelerometer switches on the propeller only after the bird has taken flight, so it won’t slice the hand that launches it.

READ MOAR HIER (http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2013/03/unmanned-flight/horgan-text)

boutons_deux

02-28-2013, 10:54 AM

the MIC hates drones as "immoral", as if the MIC had any moral or ethical sense or responsbility

Sleazy Military Contractors Are Crying Foul Over Drones -- They Stand to Lose Billions

All the talk about drones focusses on their “morality.” But there's a funny thing about morality talk: most of it seems to come down to money. This time's no different.

The worst thing about drones is that they’re cheap. That’s interfering with the vacation-home budgets of a lot of very sleazy DoD contractors and their pet Texas congressmen, and that’s why you’re hearing a consensus around how “immoral” drones are.

Remember this: Drones are a threat to the sleaziest acquisition program in the history of defense contracting: the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. There have been some pretty disgusting lemons in the sorry history of the DoD — you just have to think back to SDI, also known as “Star Wars,” to find a weapons system that not only didn’t work but was never meant to work — but I’d have to say that the F-35 is an even bigger con job than Star Wars.

Truth is, the Defense Department stopped being about defense a long, long time ago. Nobody even knows who we’re supposed to be defending ourselves from with this ultra-high tech (bad tech, too) fighter aircraft. Nobody wants to play “Dogfight in the Skies” with us any more. That’s why there wasn’t a dry eye in the Pentagon when the USSR went bust: “Who’s gonna play Red Team in our simulations now?”

Wars like the ones we fight in the real here and now, like the one against the Taliban, don’t offer a lot of scope for Top Gun dreamers. But nobody in the USAF wants to face that fact. They love Corvettes with wings. Always have. To them, drones are like buying a fleet of Toyota Corollas: They may get you where you want to go, but where’s the fun, man?

Even manned aircraft that actually have some use run into resistance from the USAF. The only really useful ground attack plane we have is the A-10, and the USAF hated that plane when it was being pushed through development. It was slow, it was ugly — seriously, that was one of their objections, the way the “Warthog” looked — it wasn’t sexy at all, wouldn’t make for good calendar photos for the fighter pilot brohs.

And if drones replace manned fighters — which they could, right now — all that wonderful cash will be out of reach, because as I keep saying here, drones have this one unforgivable flaw: They’re cheap. The MQ1 Predator, our main attack drone, costs $4 million per copy. That’s about two percent of what the F-35’s planned cost, and since you can safely double the planned cost, the MQ1 really costs about 1% of what the F-35 will cost.

One percent. For a lot of suffering USAF procurement officers, Texas congressmen, and DoD contractors out there, that’s the difference between a Maserati and a mere Porsche, a beach house in La Jolla vs. one in Oceanside, where beaches are infested with non-millionaires. It’s a real-live moral dilemma, a heart-rending tragedy, which is why they’ve triggered their tame pundits and the media outlets they place ads in to start moaning about how eeeeeevul drones are
.
Big, big money. And where’s it go? The simplest answer is “in the pockets of some sleazy Congressmen from Texas, naturally.” “Texas”: that’s the answer to a lot of questions, like, “What’s America’s biggest cross to bear?” Texas, Texas, Texas. U. S. Grant knew it long ago; you read his memoirs and you can tell that for him the worst part of the Mexican War was that we killed all those poor campesino conscripts just to please the Anglo Tejanos

From the start, the Predator drone was a huge success. And that’s why we stopped buying it after getting a miserable 200 of them. At a miserable $4 million per, the Predator just isn’t interesting to the Armed Services. Of course the makers of the Predator did their best, coming up with a gold-plated heavy version called the Reaper, but even that only costs $37 million, one sixth of what you can make off an F-35.

And as far as performance goes … well, the biggest design limitation, and I mean by far, on a manned plane is the man, or the woman — the meat bag sitting in the cockpit. It’s a huge drag on the potential maneuverability of the airframe. Take that drag out of the picture and you can build drones that can out-manuever anything in the sky — never mind F-35s, but real planes like the F-15. In real war, where the rotten gets weeded out fast, manned planes would be boutique items within a few months, and the skies would be filled with drones sporting the stencils of whatever power had the sense to adopt them bigtime.

Then there’s that other advantage, the one that isn’t really an advantage at all — in fact, it’s the reason we’re gonna get stuck for 2500 F-35s but we’ve ended drone buys at a piddling 200 Predators and 57 Reapers: Drones are cheap. And that is one thing that the defense industry really thinks is immoral.

http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/sleazy-military-contractors-are-crying-foul-over-drones-they-stand-lose-billions?paging=off