PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Shipboard Rolling Vertical Landing - The saviour of Dave-B?
Old 3rd Sep 2008, 16:30
  #73 (permalink)  
LowObservable
 
Join Date: Jan 2004
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CV autoland is a huge part of the Navy's X-47B unmanned combat aircraft program, but won't be demonstrated until 2011.

If the program survives, and if it works, the effect on CV aviation is vast. Why so? Because the requirement is that automatic landing should be at least as safe as a piloted landing at all times.

And if the GPS and computers do as well as the pilot on a clear, calm day, they will inevitably do better on a rainy, windy night, because they sense deviations and make corrections at a much higher cycle rate, and because the system uses GPS and neither knows nor cares that it can't see the lights.

It's also a system that is not hard to retrofit to any fly-by-wire airplane.

However, the RN has to make its decision before we know whether it works...
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