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Next generation robot warplanes
UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems has shown off a raft of new robotic concepts this week at the Farnborough Air Show. But the newest and biggest kid on the BAE droidplane block is the Mantis, a large and powerful twin-engined technology demonstrator project whose wraps came off on Monday for the ceremonial inking of an MoD contract.
In essence, it's a fairly normal unmanned aerial vehicle of the same general type as the well-known American Predator and Predator-B/Reaper. The exact capabilities and subsystems are being decided, but Mantis will have visible and infrared imaging, a ground-scanning radar, and in all probability a laser-dot pointer for precision guided munitions. The model here at Farnborough was shown with mockup smartbombs and "Brimstone" missiles attached, too (Brimstone is the Europeanised version of the successful Hellfire tankbuster, already employed on attack helicopters and Predators).
The Mantis has some special sauce not usually seen on current Predators and such - it will use onboard processing, allowing much less bandwidth to be used in downloading radar data. This potentially spares the British forces' pay-as-you-go PFI satcomms budget, and could be a popular feature. Likewise, the Mantis is intended to fly autonomously as much as possible, avoiding the severe pilot-manpower burdens associated with most of the present-day Predator fleet.
“As a company, we have not got drawn into the ‘me too’ group of unmanned air vehicles,” said BAE robocraft chief Mark Kane in a statement earlier this week. “We have skipped a generation and whereas most current UAVs are remotely piloted or have some automatic functions, ours are fully autonomous.”
This would seem about all the autonomy you actually want in current wars like Afghanistan or Iraq. Super-UAVs which can fly an entire mission without any communications back to a ground station might have some advantages in big wars against sophisticated enemies, but wouldn't need - and wouldn't be allowed to use - full autonomy above today's battlefields. In any case, by Wright's description, the Mantis in particular - unlike BAE's other MoD demonstrator, Taranis - isn't intended to be independent. Primarily a surveillance and recce platform, Mantis would lose most of its point if it never told anybody what it could see.
Asked what Mantis would bring to the party that wouldn't be available from other companies sooner and almost certainly cheaper, Wright said that a big advantage for Mantis would be "sovereignty", in that the machine's support and parts base would be British rather than under foreign control. But he was reluctant to say hand on heart that Mantis wouldn't incorporate any overseas kit or need any overseas backup, and understandably so - that would make it a very exceptional aircraft indeed. Just one of the candidate subsystems (the Selex Galileo PicoSAR radar being considered for Mantis) is at least partly Italian.
All in all, the Mantis does indeed look a bit like a "me too" system. BAE have seen the explosion in UAV use - especially by the military, but more and more in the civil sector - and they are determined to catch up with the leaders, ideally at the taxpayers' expense. Mantis has actually been under development for some time, and it seems plain that BAE would need to do it whether or not they had any seed money from the UK MoD. Even if that weren't the case, it's hard to see why the MoD would care - it is already flying Reapers, and would buy more right now if it had the money.
The MoD having recently stated that it can buy brand new Reapers for £10m a pop, it seems reasonable to suppose that actually the Mantis pricetag is being withheld so that people won't ask why we don't just buy X number of Reapers or Sky Warriors instead - or even, perhaps, Y number of desperately-necessary Chinook transport choppers, armoured vehicles or whatever. After all, there's a whole other government department in charge of business subsidies. UK-headquartered arms globocorp BAE Systems has shown off a raft of new robotic concepts this week at the Farnborough Air Show. But th... more -
American Airlines testing anti-missile technology
The first passenger plane equipped with a system to repel shoulder-fired missiles successfully completed its flight, a British defense and aerospace company announced.
The JetEye infrared missile-defense system was tested on an American Airlines flight that took off July 11, according to a statement from BAE Systems. The plane flew from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport to Los Angeles International Airport in California, the company said.
The JetEye system works by detecting the heat-seeking missiles and then firing a laser, which diverts the missile. American Airlines refused to make the system mandatory on all trips but agreed to cooperate with the tests.
The flight represents the final phase of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Counter-Man-Portable Air Defense System program, designed to test the suitability of missile-protection equipment for commercial aircraft.
Previously, the technology was successfully evaluated on an American Airlines test aircraft and an ABX Air Inc. cargo aircraft.
The missile-protection equipment will be installed on two more American Airlines 767-200 aircraft for daily cross-country flights through March. Engineers will evaluate the system's maintainability and reliability, as well as its suitability for the airline industry. No missiles will be fired at these flights.
"BAE Systems worked closely with DHS and the airline industry to develop an effective response to potential terrorist threats," said Burt Keirstead, JetEye program director for BAE Systems in Nashua, New Hampshire.
Homeland Security officials said in January that there is no specific threat of these weapons being fired at planes.
However, Taliban forces successfully used shoulder-fired missiles against Soviet helicopters in Afghanistan. Terrorists tried in 2002 to shoot down an Israeli passenger jet in Kenya with them.
Insurgents hit a cargo plane in Baghdad the following year, but the plane landed safely.
Experts say that about 500,000 to 700,000 shoulder-fired missile weapons have been produced worldwide, and some have been purchased in Middle Eastern and Central Asian arms markets for as little as $5,000.
Since 2003, Congress has pressured Homeland Security to adapt military anti-MANPADS technology to commercial aviation.
BAE Systems, based in Farnborough, England, works with American Airlines Maintenance and Engineering Services, which provided the test aircraft and engineering services for the development of JetEye.
DHS awarded BAE Systems a $29 million contract in January for this final evaluation phase of the program, which calls for the planes to log about 7,000 flight hours.
Northrop Grumman, a defense company with its own system to protect planes from portable missiles, urged the Defense Department in March to install its system on commercial flights that take soldiers and equipment to war zones.
Jack Pledger, a Northrop Grumman executive, said in March that 27 terrorist groups are believed to possess shoulder-fired weapons, that aircraft are vulnerable to the missiles within 25 miles of airports and that one missile incident could have catastrophic effects on the U.S. economy.
In March, the Northrop system concluded a 14-month test during which anti-missile systems were installed on 11 FedEx cargo planes that flew 4,500 flights. The first passenger plane equipped with a system to repel shoulder-fired missiles successfully completed its flight, a British defense... more -
RF/Microwave technologies advance for military systems
From the device level through signal sources and integrated assemblies, suppliers of RF/microwave components continue to contribute to advances in military electronic systems.
Military electronics systems generally leverage the latest technologies in order to achieve performance or even tactical advantages. Although systems, such as radar and electronicwarfare (EW) platforms, are comprehensive collections of analog, digital, and RF circuits and devices, it is often the technology in a part as small as a transistor that can have an enormous impact on the overall performance of a military electronics system. From the device level through signal sources and integrated assemblies, suppliers of RF/microwave components continue to contribute to... more -
Top 5 benefits of FPGA technology
Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology continues to gain momentum, and the worldwide FPGA market is expected to grow from $1.9 billion in 2005 to $2.75 billion by 20101. Since its invention by Xilinx in 1984, FPGAs have gone from being simple glue logic chips to actually replacing custom application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and processors for signal processing and control applications. Why has this technology been so successful? This article provides an introduction to FPGAs and highlights some of the benefits that make FPGAs unique.
Top Five Benefits:
1. Performance
2. Time to Market
3. Cost
4. Reliability
5. Long-Term Maintenance
At the highest level, FPGAs are reprogrammable silicon chips. Using prebuilt logic blocks and programmable routing resources, you can configure these chips to implement custom hardware functionality without ever having to pick up a breadboard or soldering iron. You develop digital computing tasks in software and compile them down to a configuration file or bitstream that contains information on how the components should be wired together. In addition, FPGAs are completely reconfigurable and instantly take on a brand new “personality” when you recompile a different configuration of circuitry. In the past, FPGA technology was only available to engineers with a deep understanding of digital hardware design. The rise of high-level design tools, however, is changing the rules of FPGA programming, with new technologies that convert graphical block diagrams or even C code into digital hardware circuitry.
FPGA chip adoption across all industries is driven by the fact that FPGAs combine the best parts of ASICs and processor-based systems. FPGAs provide hardware-timed speed and reliability, but they do not require high volumes to justify the large upfront expense of custom ASIC design. Reprogrammable silicon also has the same flexibility of software running on a processor-based system, but it is not limited by the number of processing cores available. Unlike processors, FPGAs are truly parallel in nature so different processing operations do not have to compete for the same resources. Each independent processing task is assigned to a dedicated section of the chip, and can function autonomously without any influence from other logic blocks. As a result, the performance of one part of the application is not affected when additional processing is added.
The adoption of FPGA technology continues to increase as higher-level tools evolve to deliver the benefits of reprogrammable silicon to engineers and scientists of all expertise. Field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology continues to gain momentum, and the worldwide FPGA market is expected to grow from $1.... more -
Israeli fighter pilots almost blasted Tony Blair’s jet out of sky
Tony Blair came within moments of being killed when two Israeli fighter aircraft threatened to shoot down a private jet taking him to a Middle East conference in the belief that it might have been staging a terrorist attack.
The warplanes were scrambled to intercept after the jet pilot failed to contact air traffic control. Mr Blair, the international community’s envoy to the Middle East, was flying from the World Economic Forum (WEF) summit in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh to attend a major conference on private investment in the Palestinian city of Bethlehem.
The Israeli aircraft used to intercept Mr Blair’s plane would have been versions of the F16 or F15, armed with Shafrir and Python air-to-air missiles. Both missiles have proved to be devastatingly effective and versatile.
Air traffic controllers spotted a suspicious aircraft heading into Israeli airspace from the Sinai peninsula on Monday and made several attempts to establish contact. When the pilot failed to respond to their urgent requests, the Israelis scrambled two fighters to intercept what they feared could have been a terrorist attacker.
During the entire incident, Mr Blair — flying with other delegates from the WEF, who were also attending the Bethlehem conference — was not informed of the situation by the pilot.
Israeli forces have been on high alert for threats from the Sinai region since Hamas knocked down a wall on the Egyptian border five months ago and had free access in and out of the besieged Gaza Strip for a week.
Initial investigations into the events indicated a technical malfunction was to blame for the breakdown in communication, the Israeli newspaper Maariv said, adding that new systems had been set up in recent months to identify suspicious aircraft. Tony Blair came within moments of being killed when two Israeli fighter aircraft threatened to shoot down a private jet taking him to ... more -
Airplane Heal Thyself? Self-Repairing Aircraft Could Improve Air Safety
Airplanes get old, and over time their skins can develop tiny holes and cracks. Mechanics are good at spotting these problems during regular maintenance checks, but a technique developed in Britain that mimics natural healing could allow airplanes to repair themselves.
Researchers at the Engineering and Sciences Research Council are developing composite materials that "bleed" resin when stressed or damaged, effectively creating a "scab" that fixes the damage. It's an innovation that could drastically improve air safety, foster the development of lighter aircraft and bring biomimicry to aviation.
"This project represents just the first step", says Dr. Ian Bond, the aerospace professor leading the research. "We're also developing systems where the healing agent isn't contained in individual glass fibres but actually moves around as part of a fully integrated vascular network, just like the circulatory systems found in animals and plants. Such a system could have its healing agent refilled or replaced and could repeatedly heal a structure throughout its lifetime. Furthermore, it offers potential for developing other biological-type functions in man-made structures, such as controlling temperature or distributing energy sources."
Think about the body's healing process and the technology behind self-healing plastics is easy to grasp.
When we cut ourselves, sticky cells called platelets clump together near the wound to create a plug that stops the bleeding and begins the healing. The principle behind the self-healing plastic Bond has developed at University of Bristol technique is remarkably similar. Airplanes get old, and over time their skins can develop tiny holes and cracks. Mechanics are good at spotting these problems during r... more -
Personal aviation the way of the future?
"When your 100mpg (miles per gallon) car is stuck in traffic and a 100mpg airplane whizzes overhead, you're going to be jealous."
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Military contractor superheroes
When superhero Tony Stark isn't donning his Iron Man armor to personally rough up villains, he's pitching the U.S. military on new gadgets to fight the War on Terror.
The Marvel comic book character's suit embodies a futuristic technology that may enhance human capabilities in war, but the current battlefield belongs to a growing swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and robots that could someday give even Iron Man a run for his money. UAVs clocked more than 500,000 hours in the air by the beginning of 2008, performing many of the tasks normally done by piloted aircraft.
Stark might be the new face of military contractors. Private individuals and companies may not be as visible as UAVs soaring above the skies of Afghanistan and Iraq, yet their role has grown just as dramatically during the recent conflicts.
Tony Stark, played by Robert Downey Jr. , is based partly on real-life wealthy industrialist Howard Hughes, who lent his eccentric genius and financial resources to oddball U.S. military efforts during World War II and the Cold War.
The military-industrial complex really took off in the 1950s as the United States sought new weapons and technologies for its growing military, which gave Hughes and other military contractors a market to sell everything from helicopters to satellites.
Private companies are eager for contracts, the military looks for next-generation weapons , and some in Congress jockey for new defense-related jobs for their districts. No one questions that the United States could not fight a war now without outsourcing to military contractors.
When superhero Tony Stark isn't donning his Iron Man armor to personally rough up villains, he's pitching the U.S. military on new gad... more
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