Invisible Unmanned Aircraft

MattSparkes writes, "A Minnesota company, VeraTech, has applied for a patent on an unmanned drone that is nearly invisible to the naked eye. The Phantom Sentinel takes advantage of the phenomenon where fast moving objects appear as only a blur, so it fades out of view once it speeds up. This is achieved by rotating the entire craft. The center of gravity is in open air between two of the blade-like wings. There are some videos of a prototype in action on the VeraTech site." The company says you could get usable video of the terrain by processing the images from a spinning camera. One version of the drone is small enough to launch by throwing it like a boomerang. And it folds for travel.

Invisible spinning boomerang planes

[Anonymous Coward]

'Catch!'

'Ouch'

Re:Hmm

[thewils]

No no no, what you're seeing is the craft edited into the video in the first place. You can't see it normally 'cos it's invisible.

Re:Invisible spinning boomerang planes

[russ1337]

have you seen the photo in TFA? ...

Private Jones: So what's the boomerang doing now? What can you see?

Private Smith: Its heading straight toward some dumb looking shmuck wearing those gay VR goggles.... hey what the..?!!

Re:Videos?

[Ant P.]

At this point in time I'd say it's the videos themselves.

Article Picture

[drpimp]

Is it me, or do the boys in the article in fatigues look like they are like 13? Made for the Army, but cool enough for teens? Hmm, interesting!

Re:No it isn't invisible

[russ1337]

>> "This thing probably sticks out like dogs balls on radar."

Excuse my asking, but how well do Dog-balls stand out on Radar?

Re:Invisible spinning boomerang planes

[Rob T Firefly]

Allright, who's the wiseguy that gave Nerf a defense contract?

Re:No it isn't invisible

[onkelonkel]

Removing the dog balls from the B-2 bomber reduced its radar return by 42%.

Really.

Like a car's wheel

[Gruneun]

Once it gets up to a certain speed, will the optical illusion cause it to appear to be spinning very slowly in the opposite direction? It might be easy to identify then.

I've got one

[ArcherB]

Invisible Plane?

I build one of these things years ago. Unfortunately, I haven't seen it since its first test flight.

Prior Art

[El_Smack]

Man, will they be pissed when they see this [engadget.com].

VeraTech vs Veritech (Robotech)

[Zantetsuken]

Did anybody else think of the similarity between VeraTech and Veritech [wikipedia.org] of the Robotech [wikipedia.org] anime? The article summary even says "...it folds..." - a transformation just like the Veritech Fighter to humanoid form!

Re:Problem/Solution

[Plutonite]

I'm a hippie and I find your comment mildly offensive. If you added long hair to that description I would have you reported to the blog's moderators.

Re:Problem/Solution

[RealGrouchy]

Meh. Just get them to think that looking for planes is somebody else's problem.

- RG>

Re:Videos?

[Anonymous Coward]

1. Requires line-of-sight to control them.

Wait a minute, the invisible aircraft requires line-of-sight? Am I the only one seeing a problem here?

Re:Invisible

[Scrameustache]

might actually be pretty useful against the Swiss

Oh I don't think so [gadmin.ch].

Chuck one of those at the thing and it's sure to go down.