Youtube daily vehicle Jun 30 2017

Remotely piloted aircraft had a very significant learning curve. Early examples were always

crashing. So this was a pretty difficult endeavor to make happen. As a result it took a very

long time to have really reliable systems. RPA's go back to really the beginning of

the 20th century and for about the first thirty years. So from about 1900 to 1930 RPA's

and guided missiles were really the same thing. During world war one the British wanted to

use an aerial torpedo to fight the zeppelins. Americans, French, Germans were looking at

something that they could use to attack ships or land based targets. And so rockets were

too hard to turn into weapons at that time in terms of putting guidance systems in them

so turning an airplane into a weapon was really what they were trying to do. And then in the

1930's now that aircraft are flying higher and faster, shooting them down really gets

to be a difficult challenge. They need realistic targets and one way to do that is by having

a remote controlled aircraft that these gunners could shoot at. In world war two they kind

of go back to the idea of turning full size airplanes into weapons again. The U.S. is

using what they called war-weary bombers. So bombers that had flown so many missions

that they weren't safe to fly with humans anymore. They put radio controlled equipment

in it, packed it full of explosives, and they flew them against hardened targets in France

and in Holland. There is a continuous back and forth between using a remotely piloted

aircraft for a weapon system and then using it for other purposes including reconnaissance.

Now right on the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis they're starting to look at using

these for reconnaissance platforms. There's a realizations that there's a lot of communist

held territory that would be very dangerous to fly over. There's an awareness that the

U-2 for all of its attributes is not going to be invulnerable for very long because the

Soviets were developing service to air missile systems. Within the past week, unmistakable

evidence has established the fact that a series of offensive missile sites is now in preparation

on that imprisoned island. They wanted something they didn't have to put a human pilot at

risk, a pilot that could be captured. So they started using these target drones, building

them out, putting bigger wings on them, putting autopilots on them, making a lot more sophisticated

able to carry cameras. And it's really not until the mid 1990's and the birth of the

Predator that things really changed. One of the problems that they realized early on was

that it was very easy for the Predator to get into a position to where a mountain might

block the line of sight to the control aircraft or the ground station and so there was a big

push to put satellite data links into them. In 1999 there was another problem that was

realized, that it was great if a Predator could spot a tank column in the field, but

then if you're going talk an attack aircraft onto it like an A-10, it didn't work very

well. They realized let's just put the weapons actually on the Predator. In early 2001this

aircraft was mounted with the AGM-114 Hellfire Missile. A laser guided weapon system and

that gave it an attack capability. This was really kind of a milestone, not only was it

used to develop that new method of warfare that has really become dominant over the last

17 years, but it also was the first to really truly demonstrate that capability in the field.

I think over the century we are going to see a move to more autonomy, but it is a huge

leap. It's one that is very very difficult. It's going to require some very significant

advances in artificial intelligence, but we're not really quite there yet. So we're talking

about something that still has a pilot, but the pilot is not

in the aircraft.