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The Seattle Times on the next-generation UAV:
Boeing displayed its vision of the future of air warfare Tuesday, a batlike model of a small fighter craft that exudes silent menace.This will be cause for concern among science fiction fans and fighter pilots alike. It will be interesting to see if those who are motivated purely by "concern for the troops" to call for withdrawal from Iraq would be willing to embrace long distance, remote controlled warfare as an alternative.Sitting in a parking lot inside Boeing's research complex across from the Museum of Flight, the craft has a 49-foot wingspan and measures 39 feet from nose tip to tail. Smart bombs hang down below the wings.
But it has no windows. And its profile is flat, four feet from top to bottom. At the front, where the cockpit should be, there's a gaping hole for engine air intake. The Boeing-designed X-45 is unmanned.
The airplane is "piloted" by someone watching a computer screen in a fortified trailer that can be deployed near a war zone. "This is fly by mouse," said Dave Koopersmith, X-45 vice president and program manager. The aircraft's sensors identify and approach targets autonomously. The remote pilot gives consent to strike with a mouse click.
Lest you think this is something for the future, Time Magazine has a story on the currently operational Predator - whose missions in Iraq are flown by pilots at Nellis AFB.
Six days a week, Shannon Rogers kisses his wife and two young kids goodbye and wheels his battered 1989 Chevy Cavalier out of the driveway of his suburban Nevada home. The houses here are cookie cutter, done in beige stucco. Like most of the other dads and some moms in this traditional middle-class community, Rogers heads down Interstate 215, toward his job near Las Vegas, using the 30-minute drive to make the mental transition from family man to workplace professional. But Rogers will end up in a place far different from that of his fellow commuters: when he arrives at work, he will be at war in Iraq.Update: Via commenter Tim Oren, several videos of the X-45 in action here.Rogers, an Air Force major and experienced fighter pilot, is part of an élite group of U.S. troops playing a crucial role in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the U.S.'s most notorious playground. From Nellis Air Force Base, outside Las Vegas, Rogers controls a Predator, a flimsy drone that has been transformed from a spy plane into one of the wars' most lethal weapons.
