A post was merged into an existing topic: AI vs. Al (Artificial Intelligence vs. someone named Albert or Alfred)
That made me laugh
That was my question too. Cirrus has a self landing system that apparently does this but I don’t thing it’s a 2-way conversation. If I had to guess I’d say there’s a remote pilot handling communication.
There was a safety pilot on board, so they could have handled the communications.
Another F-16 crash, ejection, safe pilot.
The Cirrus (and the other models of aircraft that integrate Garmin’s Autoland) don’t do two way comms with ATC. They declare an emergency and repeatedly announce next actions, the assumption being that ATC is listening and clearing the route.
An adversary contractor crashed. Pilot ejected and was rescued.
I gotta say that I think it makes a lot more sense to use modern production training jets, not 70+yo (!) run out corroding unmaintainable warbirds for that role.
As a matter of both crew and public safety, DoD should be legally required to only contract with outfits running modern equipment. Because otherwise it’s a race to the cost bottom. And we know how those races always end.
A shame to lose another Hawker Hunter. Beautiful plane.
What is an adversary contractor? Someone a government hires to carry out certain military, enforcement, or security duties - and if so, what sorts of things?
(I know Google is my friend, but I’d rather learn from you all).
John
I was curious as well. They are training AWACS folks, and the adversary plane is playing the part on a possible enemy for the trainees to detect (I think I got that right)
Brian
Ah, I see. Makes sense - thanks.
Indeed, the Hunter is a beautiful plane. Even though only the engines appear in it, now I want to see this documentary.
My answer came from my first read of the article. Now I’m not so sure. I am pretty sure it plays as some sort of enemy aircraft for folks to train around.
Brian
The other things the adversaries do is pretend to be enemy fighters for air to air combat practice with / against US fighters.
This got started back in the Viet Nam era by first USN then USAF. Once it got going, USAFs effort was always larger scale than USN’s. Here’s some history & general info: Aggressor squadron - Wikipedia.
Nowadays (or almost all) of USN / USAF-operated adversary stuff has been shut down for budget / headcount reasons and private companies are contracted instead to do the same work.
Down at the bottom of that wiki article is a good intro to current contractor ops with a bunch of links to other wiki articles.
It’s probably a good idea to use as mix of old and new aircraft in adversary training, as not every enemy will be fully equipped with state of the art equipment. Older aircraft may sometimes do things that are unexpected for newer ones, and your pilots need to be familiar with all possible enemy capabilities.
But don’t the news organizations also know this little secret? I worked in TV news for 25 years and I know that if a newsroom can save money using a drone instead of a chopper that’s exactly what they’re going to do.
Since money is the number one driver of decisions such as this I have to assume that that newsroom had a good reason to spend extra $$$ using a chopper over a drone.
Among other things, a news chopper is advertising.
If you see a news chopper circling overhead, you might not know what’s going on, but you know what channel to tune into to see. That’s not going to work so well with a drone.
Plus, drones tend to be shorter-ranged, and must stay within the line-of-sight of the operator, so where a chopper can suddenly zoom off from a situation that’s been resolved over to another 20 air miles away, and arrive there in just a few minutes, a single drone would have to be recovered and then have to make its way via surface transportation to a new point of interest. If you have several drones, the savings from not operating the chopper will be drowned out by the expense of having to have an operator near each drone.
This probably has something to do with it but money will eventually win out.
Remember the ipad introduction? What a stupid product. A tiny computer with no external keyboard. In the aviation market alone it revolutionized handheld moving map displays. And by revolutionized I mean wiped out. An $800 ipad not only replaced a $3,500 handheld unit it was better by many magnitudes.
Can a drone do everything a helicopter do? pretty much. A helicopter has the advantage of distance from the center of a news station. That can be covered by dispersing drones around the area. Once on-station the advantages of a drone takes over. A tethered drone can hover indefinitely with a power cable. Multiple drones can be set for different views. All at a fraction of the cost of a helicopter.
I think this is the direction news stations will gravitate toward. We’re starting to see serious tethered drones enter the market.
I think you’re spot-on that newsgathering drones are a coming thing. And many newscopters will be obsoleted within a decade.
I also think you’re a bit premature on how quickly this will happen, or how much it’s already happened.
This has been happening for a while now. Not so much because of drones, just because TV news is a shrinking business and helicopters are expensive. All three major stations in Columbus had helicopters at one point, but they’re all gone now.