That kinda reminds me of what I heard Tom Clancy say in an interview once, and I am paraphrasing. When asked how one could bring a nuclear bomb into the states he said: "Just wrap it in cocaine and bring it through the Port if Miami."

Ditto for android.

UAV's also have weight issues. The shadow, the one mentioned in the article, doesn't have any kind of radar, heck it doesn't even have brakes. This is due to the very reliable but fairly weak engine it uses. It's internal computer basically only handles the inertial nav system, the communications, and maintains straight and level flight. The ground control station makes all the actual decisions. If the AV loses contact with the GCS, it's preprogrammed either to return to a predesignated coordinate and fly a loiter pattern (hopefully getting signal back again on the way), or to deploy it's parachute.

In other words, nevermind avoiding another aircraft, this thing will fly into a mountain if allowed to fly itself. I believe that the reason that this aircraft is the one being selected for FAA approval is because of it's reliability at doing it's job even with it's limitations, not because of it's feature set. My unit, and many others, have never crashed one of these UAV's. Other UAV's, even more sophisticated ones, fall out of the sky all the time. While the shadow is not perfect, it is definately going to be the benchmark in the future for how rugged and simple versus how feature rich a UAV needs to be.

I joined the Marine Corps just over a year ago, and one thing they taught us in recruit training is that anytime the name Marine occurs in a news story, there will be a huge blowup over the issue, and the fact that the marines are involved. For example, if an army soldier gets in trouble, they say Private Whomever. If a marine gets in trouble, the headline goes something like, "MARINE GETS DUI" or "MARINE BEATS HIS WIFE". This story definately highlights that point. They have banned social networking sites on their own intranet. They have not banned me from viewing such sites via other means. Many of my fellow marines who have deployed tell me about how they can to to a USO or MCCS tent and do pretty much what they want on the internet while deployed (depending on availability, of course). Hell if i remember correctly, when i used to work for G.E., they did similar things on their intranet, and that was 10 years ago. No one made too much noise about it then, probably because it wasn't the marine corps.

Hi, I am an active duty US Marine who works with UAVs. The Shadow and the Predator are both controlled by Solaris workstations, running CDE as their desktop environment. The operators have no difficulty learning the system and never have to open a CLI. In fact, me as a tech, really never have to either.

As right as you may be on all points reguarding THIS incident, there are many many more documented cases of birds destroying engines, windshields, air speed sensors (which you just CAN'T fly without in modern aircraft), etc... so bashing airbus' engineering principles is going to do nothing to help this problem.

The article is misleading. With UAV's, tailhooks are often used as a means to land the AV on land. The RQ-7B Shadow, for example, uses a tailhook for 2 main reasons:
1: To shorten the runway length needed to land (it uses a launcher so runway length during takeoff isn't a consideration).
2: It kinda doesn't have any brakes.
All the UAV systems i have seen so far that land on ships tend to do a controlled crash into a net. So while it may be possible that GA is intending to land on carriers, I think it more likely that the author was pulling stuff out his ass.

Man i wish i had mod points right now. As moot a point as it is for me to say so, i'd spend all 5 on you and the GP. You''dve gotten 3 positive, and the GP would've gotten 2 flaimbait, and id've felt my mod duties would have been achieved.