Binghi
Seems you crew had a good night last night
I stuck to my usual 17:00 knock off time. But, I always welcome advice to further my research. It seems you consider I am a fool for indicating that UAV may be manually flown or use video/FLIR?
Perhaps you can offer comment on this:
For the manual control of the flight path of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), the instruments provided in a UAV Control Station (UCS) are similar to those found in the cockpit of an aircraft. Typically the out-of-the-window view is represented by a forward looking camera and a plan-view display containing an electronic map is used for navigational
conformance monitoring.
Obviously, the richness of the visual-, motion- and auditory cues that is available to the pilot of a manned aircraft is not available to the UAV operator. In addition, the information that is available to the UAV operator typically suffers from low update rates and resolution, caused by sensor and data link bandwidth limitations.
Furthermore, compared to manned aircraft, the data presented by the instruments in the UCS is subjected to an increased latency due to the (digital) data link. Even when using a flight director (FD) command display, the manual control task is considerably more difficult compared to piloting a manned aircraft.
and
A high resolution color CCD camera capable of 800K pixels, 25x optical zoom and 1.0VP-P composite video output give you exceptional day imaging capability with the MP-DAYVIEWPTZ.
A FLIR sensor operating in the 8-12mm spectral range, 50mm germanium lens, 320x240 resolution, sensitivity greater than 85 degrees mK and a frame rate of 30Hz in the MP-NIGHTVIEWPTZ give you crisp image results under night conditions.
I don't profess to be an expert on UAV but I'm not sure why you believe they need GPS to fulfil a mission - more fool I?