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Short Wave Sportfishing[_2_]

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:44:11 -0000, wrote:

On Mon, 10 Mar 2008 19:28:18 +0000, Short Wave Sportfishing wrote:

And using low altitude stealthy drones is safer, and cheaper. In Iraq
and Afghanistan, drones seem to be carrying the bulk of aerial intell.

Safer? Certainly because it's not manned if that's what you mean by
"safer". Cheaper - perhaps.

Effective? Not really. Low speed, low altitude unmanned aircraft are
spottable and effective counter measures against them are effective - if
you notice they are there. In Iraq, you are dealing with a what are
essentially low-tech guerrillas - and fairly stupid if you watch some of
the war porn movies on YouTube. You aren't going to use one of those
beasties over flying a missile base in Moscow.

Yeah, but ... you are talking about the drones we know of, the Predator
and the Global Hawk. Just speculating here, but if you were tasked with
aerial spying, would you go for an Aurora type, or a *stealthy drone*, a
F-117 type, if you will. Me, I'm thinking stealthy.

You are missing an imporant point - communications. These things
don't fly themselves and they have to use digital communications which
means FM which means a whole host of complications dealing with the
nature of the communications not to mention range which is limited.
For an umnanned drone to fly deep into national territory, you will
need support aircraft and that's suspicious all by it'self.

Which reminds me of a funny story I heard a reliable source which is
supposedly true.

The Isralies have been on the cutting edge of unmanned drone
surveillance and have been developing drones that look, and sometimes
act, like large birds. They contracted out to a US SFx firm to build
the bird body around the airframe. The Isralies wanted a buzzard.

So they got a buzzard. And it was immediately spotted on it's first
surveillance flight by those who were being spied on.

Turns out the body was modeled after a Turkey Vulture which does not
exist in the Middle East. :)