7/11: Global Hawk recon plane

Pretty cool-looking aircraft. This is the U.S. made DRONE Global Hawk presented at a French airshow. It's a "high-altitude, long endurance unmanned aerial reconnaissance system designed to provide military field commanders with high resolution imagery of large geographic areas."

Unmanned - so if one flies along the China border and gets bumped by a Chinese pilot, there won't be any sorrys or negotiations needed.

Is it just me or...

doesn't that thing just scream for someone to sneak in and paint it up to look like Joe Camel?

toodles,

tom

Yes, unmanned Tony, but that is both a good thing and a bad thing. From what I heard, it was (from a "military secrets" point of view) a really good thing that the crew was on board, so that they could destroy as much of the plane as possible before the Chinese showed up to technology raid it.

It's cool that they are not risking any pilots lives, but I think that they Chinese Spy-Plane episode illustrated more clearly than ever than we aren't ready to operate unmanned vehicles yet, especially in a military or intelligence type of role.......

Destruct charges

I'd imagine that classified items on the drone would be protected by destruct charges. Now, when the Chinese pilot bumps the thing it simply produces a large 'bang' and a rain of small airplane pieces. End of harassment issue.

If they were -my- classified items I'd make sure the radio link was a dead man's switch, too - so if someone else tried to take it over or jam it - bang again.

But I'm not as devious as the DoD. They might very well send over cool widgets that do nothing but look like they just have to be secret and interesting. (Those cool widgets have destruct charges in them, too, and warnings about how you shouldn't try to take them apart. In English.)

It all starts now...

Whatever computer system that controls this plane will be a very evolved computer system capable of learning.

Eventually, that learning would produce our world's own "SkyNet", and all the consequences of a technological war with Robots. Damn, where's John Connor when you need him? =)

-Cyc