First RN fixed wing drone lands on carrier

Pity they didn’t clean the dead fly off the camera lens :confused:

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Strange …

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… but that looks like someone with a controller …

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… and the yawing on landing on the aircraft carrier doesn’t look like it was controlled “autonomously”.

Yup, I saw that too.

I suspect both takeoff and landing are manual, with only the flight BVLOS being autonomous

I wonder if they’ve tried hand-catching? :laughing:

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Considering a lot of commercial airline flights are autopilot landings these days it’s not that amazing, the tech has been available for a very long time so I’m surprised it’s not happened sooner.

Indeed - but they do depend on a lot of ground based tech that transmits … and the military tend to like to operate with absolute minimum transmissions to keep their location hidden.
That kind of tech could be very counterproductive for the Navy.

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True but surely radar gives the game away anyway.

Think we will need to bring back Kenny Everett

Yes, was a good video though. Thanks for sharing. Enjoyed watching that.

I believe

It looks great in calm conditions as per the video, but I think the reliance on helicopters won’t vanish.

I did think that the landing could have been a bit better.

Dead Fly ? Dead Fly ? That was the pilot.

The next stage in the project is fixing the problem with the faulty ejector seat.

It would, which is why they often don’t have it turned on, and use an airborne radar mounted on a helicopter and have it flying 50 miles away from the carrier, datalinked back to the ship. If a hypothetical enemy state (cough Russia) aims a missile strike at the radar, their volley of ten million dollar anti-ship missiles are aimed at fresh air.