BoatBanter.com - View Single Post - Navy Completes Shipboard Testing of Full Sized Drone Helicopter

Keyser Söze

On 12/25/14 8:54 PM, wrote:
On Thu, 25 Dec 2014 20:21:51 -0500, Wayne.B
wrote:

On Thu, 25 Dec 2014 14:10:48 -0500, "Mr. Luddite"
wrote:

On 12/25/2014 12:24 PM, Wayne.B wrote:

http://www.livescience.com/49259-navy-helicopter-drone-tests.html

This is not the first attempt at flying drones from a Navy vessel. The
first ship I was assigned to in 1969 had the DASH system installed,
including the required flight deck and hanger. DASH wasn't all that
successful primarily due to the primitive control and communication
electronics available at the time.

The DASH equipment was removed and the hanger was converted into
additional sleeping quarters for members of a (then classified) special
projects group of which I was a member. We were tasked with testing and
deploying a passive towed sonar array called ITASS which was used to
locate and identify Soviet subs. ITASS evolved from the land based
system called SOSUS and is now standard equipment on both anti-sub
warfare surface ships and on nuc subs. Tom Clancy mentioned it in "Hunt
for Red October" which got him into a bit of trouble with the Pentagon.

Here's the history of the original DASH gyro-copter and system:

http://www.gyrodynehelicopters.com/dash_history.htm

===

Interesting. Sometime around 1972 I was an imposter on the "To Tell
the Truth" TV program for a fellow name Ken Brock. Ken's claim to
fame was that he had flown a gyrocopter 3,400 miles cross country. It
was an interesting day in the television studio filming that sequence,
meeting the other contestants, and meeting the panelists.

Gyrocopters are pretty scary. I knew an old IBM guy who loved them but
he will always have a limp from a crash on the garden state parkway (a
leg and hip full of pins, screws and other man made parts) and he had
a bunch he walked away from. He said they were the motor cycles of the
sky.
I suppose that was viable when IBM had good insurance ;-)

Not to worry; the military will "surplus" them to the police.