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Starting with a manned aircraft is a terrible way to build an unmanned one. A good fraction of the weight is there to provide life support and safety for the pi
by tlb 7y ago
Starting with a manned aircraft is a terrible way to build an unmanned one. A good fraction of the weight is there to provide life support and safety for the pilot. The canopy is a huge compromise between aerodynamics and visibility. And for manned aircraft, it's worth spending 10x more to get a slightly lower failure rate, because pilots are so valuable. For unmanned aircraft, the reliability calculations are all different.
- stevenjohns 7y agoBut it gives access to thousands of hours of training data for that particular aircraft across a range of different situations, and it allows you to test that ML model in real situations. Moving to something lighter or more aerodynamic becomes a lot easier after that. If you look at the Boeing Airpower/Loyal Wingman UAV, it looks like its based on this concept quite closely.
- DuskStar 7y agoThat doesn't seem to be the route the XQ-58 is going, though. [0] It's an attritable stealthy missile/bomb truck - and at a projected unit cost of $2-3 million, they'd be cheaper than some US air-to-air missiles. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kratos_XQ-58_Valkyrie
- viraptor 7y agoA remotely controlled UAV would provide more hours of training data for less money.