This a great link.. Check it out.
Regards, Mike Silverstone
http://www.msnbc.com/news/644281.asp?pne=msn
Jeff Spitzer
Manager of Mechanical Engineering
General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc.
(858) 455-2667
Jeff, what kind of engine is in this version? The cowl looks too
small for the usual 914 turbo Rotax. Is it a Mazda rotary?
Paul Lamar
Oct. 18 - The United States is for the first time
flying armed, unmanned aircraft into combat
and controlling them with operators in the
United States thousands of miles from the
battlefield in Afghanistan, Defense Department
officials said yesterday.
THE USE of the armed RQ-1 Predators is a
revolutionary step in the conduct of warfare. The
slow-moving, propeller-driven aircraft have been
flown by the Air Force for six years to gather
intelligence, most recently in combat during the
Kosovo war in 1999. But now the Air Force has
outfitted them with Hellfire antitank missiles,
powerful weapons usually carried on helicopters,
the officials said.
Not much is
known about how
the armed Predators
have been used in
Afghanistan, but a
government official
said they have fired
their missiles several
times. The attacks by
the Predators mark a turning point in military
history because they signal that the Air Force is
now able to survey and then shoot at ground
positions from lower altitudes without putting
pilots at risk.
EXTENDING REACH, FLEXIBILITY
The armed drones also give the military
enormous reach and flexibility, creating the real
possibility that the United States could someday
fly combat missions without having to put large
numbers of military personnel on nearby land
bases or aircraft carriers.
Military strategists said the Bush
administration's war on terrorism could lead to
the use of additional new technologies and
methods, some of them still secret.
"I think this war is going to give you the
revolution in military affairs," said Eliot Cohen,
an expert in military strategy at Johns Hopkins
University.
The Air Force is also believed, for example, to
be trying to weaponize the RQ-4A Global Hawk,
a much longer-range unmanned surveillance
aircraft that might eventually be able to carry
weapons from the continental United States to
targets around the world. In April, the craft -
which has a longer wingspan than a Boeing 737 -
flew 8,600 miles from California to Australia.
Predators are usually operated by the Air
Force. But in the Afghanistan conflict, the
day-to-day operation has been handled by the
Central Intelligence Agency because of its
ongoing effort tracking suspected terrorist Osama
bin Laden, according to a source familiar with the
operation. After the Predators take off, control is
turned over to Air Force personnel in the United
States. In case the satellite link is lost, the CIA
has backup operators standing by to take over
control.
"The more bouncing you have to do off of
satellites and relay stations, the more potential
trouble you have to prepare for," one official said.
The deployment of the armed Predators was
first reported in the Oct. 22 edition of The New
Yorker magazine. At first Pentagon officials
dismissed the report, saying that the Air Force
was still experimenting with putting weapons
aboard the aircraft.
Publicly, that is still the Air Force's position.
Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff,
was asked at a congressional breakfast on Tuesday
about putting weapons on drones. "We will have
armed unmanned air vehicles in due course," he
responded. "We don't want to push it any faster
than it can reliably perform."
Tests on the unmanned aircraft run by the
Air Force's Air Combat Command, which
Jumper commanded until recently, culminated
last February with a successful shot of a live
Hellfire missile from a Predator against a
discarded Army tank in the Nevada desert. At the
time, officials said the test was artificial because
the Hellfire is designed to be launched by an
attack helicopter flying at treetop levels, while the
Predator usually flies at 10,000 feet and would fire
its missiles from a relatively high altitude as well.
TREATY ISSUES
Another impediment to flying an armed
drone aircraft was that some State Department
officials objected to the Pentagon effort, arguing
that "weaponizing" any drone aircraft constituted
a violation of the U.S.-Soviet treaty on
Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces. That 1987
accord calls for the elimination of, among other
things, all ground-launched cruise missiles with a
range of more than 300 miles. Some State
Department officials argued that an armed drone
was essentially a recoverable cruise missile.
But it emerged yesterday that soon after the
Air Force test in Nevada was completed, the CIA
took control of two armed Predators and began
using them in its intelligence-gathering effort
aimed at bin Laden. Photographic images taken by
the Predators are routinely transmitted back to
analysts in the United States.
The New Yorker article, by Seymour M.
Hersh, said the Predator was tracking a convoy
carrying Mohammed Omar, leader of the Islamic
Taliban militia that rules most of Afghanistan. A
request for an airstrike was turned down by
officials at the Central Command, which oversees
U.S. military operations in the Middle East and
Central Asia, the magazine said. Instead, it said,
the CIA was asked to have the Predator fire a
missile just outside the building where the convoy
stopped.
That account could not be confirmed.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
The AirCraft Rotary Engine NewsLetter. Powered by Linux.
ACRE NL web site.
http://home.earthlink.net/~rotaryeng/ http://www.linux.org