An inconvenient fact about drones: The first private drone to cross the Atlantic was 15 years ago

[Fumesucker]

Think about where we have come technologically in the last fifteen years, what a cell phone looked like and did in 1998. Anyone that wants to make an ocean crossing, GPS guided drone today can do so with readily available off the shelf components for around the cost of a halfway decent used car or a higher end bicycle. An app could be written to do the navigation and flight control with an iPhone, all the hardware except for the flight surface control servos is already in the phone.

Such a drone could be made to fly right through the front door of your home (or pretty much anywhere else) carrying anything from high explosives to nerve gas to ebola virus.

There really would be no way to stop this sort of attack short of turning off the GPS satellite net for civilian use (a capability built into the satellites) and the number of possible launching sites as well as possible targets is all but infinite.

The blowback from using these little toys is going to be horrendous sooner or later, my bet is on sooner, autonomous guided bombs will be an amazingly good way to assassinate high value individuals in any nation. A wave of just a hundred of them simultaneously going after high value individuals in the US would make it necessary for the government to turn off the GPS system, the economic damage just from that alone would be vast.

http://www.barnardmicrosystems.com/L4E_atlantic_crossing_I.htm

August 1998 - " In August 1998, Aerosonde " Laima" flew into the record books by making the first crossing of the North Atlantic by a robotic aircraft and becoming the smallest aircraft to make the crossing."

...

The first UA to cross the Atlantic was the Aerosonde Mark I “Laima” flying from Bell Cross Airport in the USA to the DERA Benbecula Range in the Outer Hebrides, covering 3,270 Km in 26 hours 45 minutes at an altitude of 1,680 m, using only 5.6 Kg of fuel.

" Laima" , named after the LatvianGoddess of good fortune, was one of three Mk I Aerosondes built in Melbourne, Australia by Environmental Systems and Services (ES& S) for the University of Washington, under a contract from the US Office of Naval Research. The Mk I Aerosonde, first defined by Holland, McGeer and Youngren (1992), was developed to operational status by a consortium consisting of ES& S, The Insitu Group from Washington State and The Australian Bureau of Meteorology."

[MannyGoldstein]

1. As long as good men have automatic weapons...

we'll be safe.

But seriously, this is a huge issue; like gunpowder, stirrups, and nuclear weapons, it will change warfare. Hopefully for the better but perhaps not.

Thanks for sharing it.

[truebluegreen]

5. What has ever changed war for the better?

Certainly not gunpowder, stirrups or nuclear weapons.

Sorry, it just seems to me a very odd way to think.

[MannyGoldstein]

2. And CONGRATULATIONS on 30,000 posts!

[phantom power]

3. and getting smaller:

This is what we're allowed to see. I wonder what's available but classified, and what's sitting on Q's lab bench.

[R. Daneel Olivaw]

4. I wonder if that mini drone has the capability for surface photo electric

cells of some kind.

Combined with a buoyant gas (dirigible drone?) that little guy could stay airborne until its motor burns out.