UK to announce joint drone project with France - Channel 4 News

Andrew Brooke has just been on Channel 4 news commenting on UAVs.

FB:)

Grauniad: British reliance on drones in Afghanistan prompts fears for civilians

MoD says four non-combatants and an unknown number of Taliban fighters have been killed in strikes since 2008

The British military is increasingly relying on unmanned drones to wage war against the Taliban, and has fired more than 280 laser-guided Hellfire missiles and bombs at suspected insurgents, new figures reveal. In the last year alone, the remotely controlled Reaper aircraft have flown more than 11,000 hours over southern Afghanistan and attacked targets with 105 high-impact precision weapons................

The UK has been using drones in Afghanistan for the last four and a half years, having bought six Reapers from the US as part of an 'urgent operational requirement'. The RAF currently uses five Reapers on constant rotation to support Nato's military campaign, and is providing 36 hours of coverage every day. This means two drones are in use much of the time.

Last July, the MoD admitted UK drones had flown a total of 23,400 hours and fired 176 missiles and laser-guided bombs since 2008. By the end of May this year, the totals had risen to 34,750 hours and 281 weapons........

More ill-informed tosh in that article... :zzz:

Looking at the stats, I'd say the answer to the original question is... YES.

And let's not forget (and I am NOT trying to start a new Nimrod topic) that the future of LRMPA for the UK is unmanned! It must be true; a senior officer said so!! :mad::ugh: Anyone really believe that there is/will be a UAV capable of doing ASW??

Its a rumour caused by all the old AEOs droning on.....

robot transport helicopter
 

fltlt, as you exhibited some knowledge on the matter in another thread, I'm sure you realise that the vast majority of RPA accidents are in the takeoff and landing phase.

Invent a system which has to be landed remotely from a TV screen with no depth perception, with hugh glider-style wings and springy undercarriage, and you're going to have the odd incident when you try to put them down.

I don't think they're demonstrably more dangerous than many other things when you get them actually up and about.

5&6

It is not the launch and recovery phase that concerns me per se. It always has been over the past almost 30 yrs the incidents that result in lol (for whatever cause, and some you just couldn't think of and/or believe) and the failure of the onboard gubbins to follow sometimes multiple cascaded fail safe commands and literally wander off on its own. Granted, it doesn't happen that often, however when everybody and their dog wants to continue making money off them when the wars end and (to me) rushing headlong down the road of "integration" into manned airspace over folks heads, in my humble opinion somebody is going to get hurt.

As for the use in LAX airspace, today a reaper was wandering around the circuit with a Bonanza chase plane, same as usual, way out in the high desert.

There are serious man (woman) interface issues with autonomous vehicles of all kinds air/ground etc., and it is not in the control loop. It is in the programmed response mapping. 99.9% of the time I can insert multiple totally autonomous vehicles into a single environment. They will react to each other because they "know" what the reactive response will be to action a/b/c etc. Introduce a human into the environment and it all goes to hell, because no matter how hard one try's to replicate the response matrix for however many folks are on earth it is so far beyond our capabilities it isn't funny. So the million dollar question is do we try, or do we train us monkeys to react to them?

Yes, done the take off and landings with the cyclops cameras, flown with them, caught things in nets, arrester wires, deployed recovery chutes to watch the ac self destruct on landing in wind, usually to prove to the nth person who thought it was a great idea that it really isn't a good idea, the list is endless. Yes they do have uses, yes make the onboard systems as reliable as the ELECTRONICS in manned ac and you will be heading down the right road.

Enough from me.

Interesting article
 

Nice article, but is it just me, or did he get their names mixed up?

Looks like he did. Confusing if you know them!

Also:

... Really? You're going to look out of the window at several thousand feet and say "no, silly UAV, that's a guy changing a tyre?" Or assess that from a grainy Litening screen? Good bit of anti-UAV propaganda from someone who doesn't know what SA tools they have, how good the picture is, etc etc.

Having tried it both ways, I'd say the pressure of being there for just 100 days means you're more likely to want to push to get a weapon off.

Yes, that Tornado flt cdr was talking sh*te. I say that as a Tornado operator! Understanding of pattern of life and context is exactly one of the strengths of a long-endurance UAV. If I was going to pick on a weakness of current UAV to make FJs look good in a press interview, I would highlight:

1) Speed of response to a distant 'situation'
2) Time to get back on station after expending all weapons
3) Ability to transit through/around very poor weather, and operate in it (to an extent)

Granted, 2) is not particularly relevant to Afghanistan given the low-ish rate of weapon use. However all 3 of these points came to the fore during Op ELLAMY. That's not to say that UAV were a sideshow in ELLAMY - far from it - but the balance of 'usefulness' favoured FJ, unlike what we see in Afghanistan.

Of course, one of the great 'strengths' of UAV is that its video feed can be widely distributed. I sometimes feel this is more of a hindrance - particularly when senior commanders get the long screwdriver out in the CAOC. There comes a point when you have to trust crews to act within ROE and make appropriate decisions; Mission Command, I think it's called in staff college-speak. The viewing of PredCam can get the CAOC too close to the action at times, focussing 'the war' on the view down one soda-straw and causing other opportunities, unseen in the CAOC, to be missed.

Alarmingly high accident rate - maybe they should 13 Sqn fly them instead? :hmm:

Also interesting is the Iranian clone in the embedded link. Reverse engineered from one we lost in Afghanistan?

Hermes accident rate prompts UK action

The British Army's interim use of leased Hermes 450 unmanned air vehicles has involved an eye-watering 11 crashes in Afghanistan since 2007, according to armed forces minister Andrew Robathan............