First weapon designed to be dropped by gravity from a drone makes debut May 9, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Drones.Tags: AAI RQ-7 Shadow, Drop-Glide, Lockheed Martin, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned combat air vehicle, US Army, USMC
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Once used only to perform ISR (Intelligence Surveillance Reconnaissance), drones are getting new weapons day after day confirming a growing trend to arm current UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) in order to make them capable to perform UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) missions.
Lockheed Martin has developed a new weapon: a drop-glide bomb called Shadow Hawk.
Shadow Hawk is the first weapon designed to be dropped purely by gravity from a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle).
Weighing in at 4.9kg (11lb) the bomb has a diameter of 6.9 centimeters (2.75 inches) and is guided by laser designator attached to the drone.
The weapons first launch was from a RQ-7 Shadow at Dugway Proving Grounds in Utah on Mar. 28, and the munition, released from an altitude of 5,100 feet, impacted its intended target only 8 inches from the laser spot center at a speed of 460 feet per second.
After the first successful launch, more tests ahead for the new lightweight, low cost PGM that can be delivered by the Shadow UAV.
Richard Clements for TheAviationist.com
Image credit: Lockheed Martin via Defense-Update
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Photo: RQ-7 Bravo drone launched at night from Kandahar (as it can’t fly much on hot days). April 29, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones.Tags: AAI RQ-7 Shadow, Afghanistan, drone, Kandahar, Lockheed C-130 Hercules, UAV, United States Marine Corps, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, US Army
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The following AP photo shows an RQ-7 Bravo UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) being prepared for launch at Forward Operating Base Pasab, in Kandahar province, Afghanistan.
It is particularly interesting because it was taken with a long exposure: the headlamps and bodies of a crew from the 508th Special Troops Battalion, 4th Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division of the US Army are blurred as they prepare the drone for a night mission.
AP Photo/The Fayetteville Observer, James Robinson
Night flying will be routinely performed during the summer months, not only for tactical purposes, but also because of fuel-leak problems caused by extreme heat: an internal US Marine Corps review of air operations in combat, released in October and available here, raised some questions about the possibility to employ the Shadow for daytime missions.
(U//FOUO) VMU-1 established a “hot weather schedule” during the summer months due to
temperatures that could reach as high as 135 degrees Fahrenheit on the runway. This
extreme heat could cause the Shadow’s wings to swell and vent fuel.
Obviously, April temperatures are not even comparable to the Afghanistan’s intense summer heat that, according to a Marine Corps Time article, forced the service to fly daytime missions with smaller drones.
A Shadow drone collided midair with an Air Force C-130 in Afghanistan on Aug. 15, 2011. The robot struck the Hercules’s left wing between the engines: although damaged, the aircraft managed to land safely, whereas the RQ-7 crashed.
Looks like summer is not a lucky season for the drone that the USMC wants to “weaponize” as soon as possible.
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Hand Signals: the next step to controlling UAVs on aircraft carriers April 4, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Aircraft Carriers, Drones.Tags: aircraft carrier, drones, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Naval Air Station Pensacola, Northrop Grumman, Office of Naval Research, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned Air Vehicle, USS Dwight D Eisenhower, X-47B
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The environment you find on the flight deck of an aircraft carrier is constantly monitored. The organized chaos of launches, recoveries and taxi takes place in a totally unforgiving environment for an unmanned aircraft (and for manned planes too…).
According to an interesting article published by Navy Times, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) took a very close look at the problem of moving UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) about the deck whilst not endangering crew or interfering to the normal operations and they came up with an ingenious camera and computer that recognises the hand signals the sailors use to guide aircraft about an aircraft carrier deck.
It may be a step that finally makes UAV use on a aircraft carrier possible. “It would be really nice if we had an unmanned vehicle that can understand human gestures” said Yale Song a Ph.D candidate at MIT who developed the system.
“Gesturing is an instinctive skill we all have, so it requires little or no thought, leaving the focus itself, as it should be, not the interaction modality” said Song.
Song’s project which began in January 2009, and was funded by the Office of Naval Research, took him to Naval Air Station Pensacola, Florida, where he learned the hand signals used by the sailors on the flight deck that he used to “train” 20 students 24 signals. The students wore a Yellow Turtleneck and a cranial to replicate the clothing used onboard carriers.
The students performed all of the signals whilst being filmed by Song’s camera/computer combination, which in turn translated their hand movements to stick figures. With this data, Song was able to develop an algorithm that is able to learn how to identify and recognize the signals from people it hadn’t met before therefore hadn’t learned their individual slight variables.
Song said “Based on that training data, we trained our model so that when new data comes in, it has our algorithm to classify the sequence of gestures.”
Song admitted that his system gets the gestures correct around 75 percent of the time, so obviously a lot of more research is needed before this system could be introduced onto an unmanned air system.
According to the Navy Times article, while Song and MIT look into recognizing hand signals, Northrop Grumman has developed a special remote control for moving the X-47B on flight decks by means of a device which attaches to the wrist, waist and one hand. The “yellow shirt” operating the device will have access to a display and will be able to control the aircraft’s throttle, tailhook, brakes and perform several other functions associated with maneuvring an aircraft on deck.
Image credit: U.S. Naval Air Systems Command
Anyway, drone operations automation has already reached aircraft carriers, at least for testing purposes.
An automated landing system, which allowed the X-47’s controllers to take control of an F-18, fly the approach and land the plane onto the flight deck of USS Dwight D Eisenhower whilst the Hornet’s crew makes no input into the plane’s flight, has already been tested. Seen from the outside, the landing looks totally normal. The LSOs still has the power to wave off the landing should they feel that the landing is unsafe or does not meet any other criteria required for a trap landing.
Richard Clements for TheAviationist.com
Ryan Aeronautical photo archive traces development of combat drones from the factory floor to deployment in southeast Asia March 19, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones.Tags: drones, Northrop Grumman, Ryan Aeronautical, Ryan Firebee, San Diego Air & Space Museum, Teledyne, UAV, UCAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned combat air vehicle
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Founded by T. Claude Ryan in 1934, part of Teledyne from 1969 and purchased by Northrop Grumman in 1999, Ryan Aeronautical company has designed, developed and built some of the most innovative and successful unmanned aerial vehicles, the most famous of those is the Ryan BQM-34 Firebee.
Ryan was a pioneer in aircraft, missiles and unmanned targets, and a photo gallery made available on Flickr by the San Diego Air & Space Museum archive provide a detailed account of the development of the early UCAVs (Umanned Combat Aerial Vehicles) from the desing phase, to the deploymnet in southeast Asia including some rare images of the early sketches, experimental types and testing activities with A-6, F-18 and F-4.
Below you can find a very small selection of images edited by Scott Mahew (thanks for the heads-up!).
The remaining +3,200 images (covering also the Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh, the ST, PT and Brougham series of aircraft) can be found here.
All images: Ryan Aeronautical via San Diego Air & Space Museum archive
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New Iranian drone capable of carrying out military and border patrol missions announced. Soon in the Syrian airspace? March 19, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Iran.Tags: drones, Iran, Karrar, Syria, UAV, UCAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Unmanned combat air vehicle
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On Mar. 17, a FARS News Agency article announced the production of the Shaparak (Butterfly), a new drone that can perform a wide variety of missions, including surveillance and border patrol.
The new robot has an endurance of about 3.5 hours, a maximum operational range of 50 kilometers (31 miles), and a ceiling of 15,000 feet (4,572 meters). Powered with a two-cylinder engine, the remotely piloted aircraft is equipped with three digital color cameras to transmit hi-rez footage to the ground control station, and can carry an 8-Kg payload.
The Shaparak is only the last one of a long series of made-in-Iran drones making the news lately.
UAVs believed to be either based on Iranian types or sold by the Tehran regime spying on the rebels activities have characterized the Syrian uprising in the last few weeks. This highlights that, although some were actually much similar to remote controlled scale models than real unmanned aircraft, in spite of foreign sanctions, Iran is continuing building new drones, some of those are successfully exported to local allies.
Noteworthy, the same FARS article traces the recent history of the Iranian industry in the production of UCAVs (Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles).
In Feb. 2011, Iran inaugurated the production line of two home-made Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), named ‘Ra’d’ (Thunder) and ‘Nazir’ (Harbinger), with bombing and reconnaissance capabilities while in Sept. 2011, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad unveiled the Karrar, country’s first home-made UCAV during a special ceremony in Tehran during the national “Day of Defense Industry”.
Karrar UCAV (Image credit: Internet)
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Syrian drones spying on rebels: made in Iran UAVs or amateur radio controlled models? March 13, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Syria.Tags: Ababil, Bashar al-Assad, Global Hawk, Homs, Iran, Mohajer 4, Pahpad, Syria, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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One of the most interesting things of the Syrian uprising, from the military analyst perspective, is the use of drones by the Syrian regime.
Syria had its drone fleet when the uprising started. According to some sources they are manufactured domestically, at the Syria’s Scientific Research Center, even if, according to the images surfaced so far, all of them are a copy of those produced by Iran.
Among the types believed to be operated by Bashar al-Assad forces: the Mohajer 4, the Ababil, (most probably) the Mirsad-1 that Hezbollah terror group has used to violate the Israeli airspace in the past, and, the only one filmed over Homs that could be clearly identified as the “Pahpad” (that is not the actual name of the robot but the short form in Persian for “remotely piloted aircraft”).
There’s another interesting drone that was spotted recently and still has to be identified. It is particularly interesting because it does not look like any of the above mentioned drones (even if a correct identification is impossible because of the extremely low quality of the footage). At first glance, its shape, color etc, recalls those of Israeli or U.S. drones. However, it is quite unlikely that it was not Syrian considered the amount of air defense and anti-aircraft systems believed to be active in Syria: U.S Joint Chief Dempsey recently said that Syrian air defense is 5 times more sophisticated than Libya, 10 times more than in former Jugoslavia (1999) and covers one fifth of the terrain.
Actually there’s also a video of seemingly solid flying object orbiting into a smoke cloud of a burning oil pipe, that someone still considers a drone.
What are these drones doing over Homs?
Depending on the payload they are carrying they can could be eavesdropping into “enemy” communications or helping ground forces to pinpoint rebels by locating the oppositors’ firing positions and directing the shelling accordingly. Noteworthy, such furing support flights do not take place at night suggesting that the loyalist robots can only carry a color/monochrome daylight TV camera.
Rebels have affirmed that they were able to shot down and recover some of these Syria’s made-in-Iran drones. However, even if the shape of the recovered drone recall that of the “Pahpad” or “Mohajer 4″, based on the below video, the downed robot seem to be much smaller that the typical UAVs (whose wingspan exceeds 5 mt).
Here below you can find a screen dump, published by Ynet of another drone recovered by rebels.
Image credit: Ynet
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Another unidentified drone filmed over Homs, Syria. Syrian, American or Israeli? March 7, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Syria.Tags: Global Hawk, Homs, Iran, Mohajer 4, Pahpad, Syria, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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The one barely visible in the following video is a drone flying over Homs, Syria.
Although, at first glance, its color, shape, etc. reminded me those of the U.S. Global Hawk, believed to be operating over Syria, its sound is the one of a propeller-driven engine. Unless some Israeli Herons, or U.S. Predators or Reapers are already operating well inside the Syrian airspace, this could be another (unidentified) drone belonging to the Assad forces.
Footage in this case is extremely low on quality and, unlike the “Pahpad” spying on the clashes, identification in this case is almost impossible. It could be another “Pahpad” or a “Mohajer 4″ even if it seems to be white/light grey in color, sensibly bigger and it is flying higher (although this could be a distortion of the camera) than the ‘bots spotted so far.
Even if what was flying in the smoke in a previous video still remains a mystery (I suggest you reading all the comments to the post to find some interesting theories) someone has explained that smoke is intentionally created to prevent UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) from targeting activities on the ground.
Thanks to Bjørn Holst Jespersen for the heads-up.
Anglo-French UAV papers go missing (along with wisdom). Do you still carry your mission critical data on paper? March 1, 2012
Posted by Richard Clements in Drones, Information Security.Tags: BAe Mantis, BAe Systems, Dassault Aviation, Dassault nEUROn, EADS, Talarion, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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In early February it was announced that France and the UK were working together on a joint drone project, a Medium Altitude Long Endurance surveillance drone with a possible secondary offensive capability.
According to an article appeared on Feb. 23 by the Telegraph newspaper, a high level executive from Dassault Aviation had his briefcase containing sensitive documents stolen from the Gare du Nord (Paris) railway station whilst en route toLondon for a high level meeting to discuss the drone.
It would appear that the thief (or thieves) used a typical deception stunt to pull off their rather brave crime: one man harassed a female colleague of the executive and whilst the executive had turned his back to deal with this, an accomplice struck and took the bag. This all took place at 5.00 PM LT whilst the platform was crowded with travellers waiting to take the Eurostar train to London via the Channel tunnel and the crime was captured on the stations CCTV cameras.
The article does speculate that the one in Paris could be a hit from a foreign intelligence agency but does come to the more mundane conclusion that this was a couple of well rehearsed opportunist thieves, not really understanding what was contained within the bag.
Dassault and the British Government brushed off the incident stating that the documents were not that secret, however, the episode does pose the question about security of possible secretive information in the days of video conferencing with document sharing, encrypted hard disks and USB tokens, and biometric authentication.
Although we don’t deal with multi-million dollar projects, we use Virtual Private Networks, SSH Tunnels, and strong authentication for data communication, signing, encrypting and decrypting texts, E-mails, files, directories, partitions etc.
Why was this executive carrying what one must assume is paper documents (as nothing is mentioned about a laptop/notebook computer) about a future military project?
Even if we assume the executive was carrying a contract or something similar that required signatures from both parties, wasn’t a private flight with an business jet much safer than public transportation?
The drone project itself was agreed upon during a meeting in early February between Nicolas Sarkosy and David Cameron and aims to develop a next generation unmanned air combat system with a prototype to be flown by 2020.
It is thought that British company BAE systems and Dassault Aviation are teaming up together to develop the new drone, to the annoyance of EADS who have their own UAV project in development called Talarion.
Details of the new UAV, that is believed to be based on the BAe Mantis drone demonstrator, are not really clear as the project is so new and quite clearly hasn’t got that far at present. However, someone somewhere could have, if not the technical specification of the robot, maybe the contractual details of the French/British project.
And elsewhere there’s someone working on an intelligence service or industrial competitor willing to pay to have a look.
Written with The Aviationist’s Editor David Cenciotti
BAe Mantis UAV demonstrator (image credit: BAe Systems)
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Mysterious drone overflying clashes in Syria could be a new type rarely seen outside Iran. And here’s a new picture (maybe). February 27, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Syria.Tags: Iran, Mohajer 4, Pahpad, Syria, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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The drone silently spying on the clashes on a suburb of Damascus, Syria, on Feb. 14, could be a much rarer UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) than the Mohajer 4 model initially believed to be depicted in the amateur video uploaded on Youtube.
Another image published by the Open Source GEOINT (OSGEOINT) blog shows the same robot from a different angle providing details that could not be visible from below.
The most evident one is that the drone has a tail boom that appears to be connected to the vertical stabilizers in the middle of the fins rather than at the top, as in the Mohajer 4.
This particular shape fits the one of a new “made in Iran” drone that, according to the members of the interesting Iran military forum, that is thought to be called “Pahpad” (پهپاد), the short form of “parandeye hedayat pazire az rahe door” (“پرنده هدایت پذیر از راه دور”) that is the Persian for “remotely piloted aircraft”.
Few images of this drone can be found on the Internet. The only one available are those published by Mashregnews.ir website (posted below) and a couple more showing a camouflaged “Pahpad” flying over Sudan.
Image credit: Mashregnews.ir
Noteworthy, the shape and livery of this plane is much similar to the one shown in a picture used in an article published FARS news agency in 2007; an article about a drone capable to perform both reconnaissance and attack missions on enemy targets, designed and manufactured by two Iranian students.
If you compare the image below and the ones above you’ll notice that the two drones are extremely similar (the main difference seems to be the landing gear).
Is this the same drone? Did FARS use an image of the so-called “Pahpad” for the article or is the drone currently flying over Syria a development of that once amateur robot designed by two students?
Image credit: FARS news agency
Anyway, although the type of drone was eventually identified, whether the “Pahpad” drone belongs to the Syrian regime or it is a Hezbollah-operated UAV remains a mystery. However, since it was filmed overflying Kafr Batna, a suburb of Damascus, the first hypothesis (Syrian UAV) seems to be more likely.
Bjoern Holst Jespersen has contributed to this article.
[Updated] Syrian Mohajer 4 drone spying on the clashes in Syria February 25, 2012
Posted by David Cenciotti in Drones, Syria.Tags: Ababil, Homs, Iran, Israel, Mohajer, Mohajer 4, Syria, UAV, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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Update Feb. 26 22.22 GMT
The following screenshot comes from the footage recorded few days ago in Kafr Batna, a small suburb of Damascus, Syria, and uploaded on Youtube. I’ve already mentioned it in my post about the drones activities over Syria, however, someone suggested the UAV that can be seen overflying the clashes is not an Israeli but a Syrian ‘bot made in Iran.
Whereas Israel can count on a wide variety of drones, some of which are particularly famous (as the “Heron”), Damascus is known to be equipped with just a few types of robots. Among them, the Iranian made Mohajer 4 and Ababil and maybe also the Mirsad-1 that Hezbollah has used to violate the Israeli airspace in the past.
After analyzing the image I’ve come to the conclusion that the one overflying Kafr Batna could be a Syrian (or Hezbollah) Mohajer 4.
Here are the spefication of this drone (credit here):
Length: 3.74 m
Wingspan: 5.3 m
Height: NA
Empty Weight: NA
MTOW: 210 kg
Payload Weight: NA
Cruise Speed: 200 km/h
Endurance: 3 hr
Range: 150 km
Ceiling: 4.57 km
Powerplant: NA
Here below you can find two images of the Iranian-made Mohajer, from the type’s Wiki page.
What’s your opinion?
Image credit: via Wikipedia
