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Bear with me as I get to flying aircraft carriers... Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing

Bear with me as I get to flying aircraft carriers... Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing & bending to me. Cruise missiles like the JASSM-158C look a lot like an autonomous unmanned aircraft to me. DARPA has been continually working on this thing for a decade now, and their recent Integration Test Event 12 involved flying four of the already remarkably intelligent missile in formation to target. Not that they'll tell us exactly what went down here, but I rather expect that under-bids the magnitude of the mission and perhaps the inter-coordination of these missiles. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-158C_LRASM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AGM-158C_LRASM https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2024-04-3-lockheed-martin-conducts-historic-lrasm-flight-test https://news.lockheedmartin.com/2024-04-3-lockheed-martin-co... Ok, so, I've somewhat convinced myself that missiles are now basically their own aircraft at this point. If you can consider that, then we do have flying carrier aircraft: the Rapid Dragon system palletizes the missiles, & has them dropped out of C-17 or C-130 aircraft. Not quite up to par with the proposed Boeing 747 Cruise Missile Carrier Aircraft (CMCA), but still pretty real. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapid_Dragon_(missile_system) More contemporarily, I can definitely imagine, say, an attack helicopter that can deploy it's own small swarm of autonomous drones.

dragonwriter 3y ago
> Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing & bending to me. Cruise missiles and (aerial) drones are both (unmanned) aircraft, and, yes, the lines between them essentially don't exist any more (especially since exoendable loitering munitions started being called “drones”, before which I would have argued drones are recoverable and cruise missiles / loitering munitions are expended in use and not intended to be recovered normally.) But usually when we talk about an “aircraft carrier”, we are usually talking about something that carries and recovers aircraft (eepecially manned aircraft), not just something that launches but does not recover expendable munitions. Other B-52s with air launched cruise mkssiles (and, heck, any plane carrying missiles) would be an “aircraft carrier”.
- reaperman 3y ago
  Even blurrier when the "unmanned" aircraft can be remotely controlled by a pilot in Las Vegas. Not manned, but still human-piloted.
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  I saw that distinction too & there's a lot of validity to it. But, I have no doubt a agm-158c could hypothetically go fly off, scout around, come back, and probably even have fine motor controls to fly close & get captured by some kind of dock. Grizzly to point this out, but also not all aircrafts in history have been designed to survive engagements. We don't say a Kamikaze suicide bomber isn't an aircraft because it doesnt land. We are however calling Ukraine's Aeroprakt A-22 based drone a drone, even though it's literally an aircraft airframe. But in general that there's a lot of things that could potentially be seen as aircraft carriers, as drones and missiles start to behave closer on the spectrum to aircrafts than to pure missiles. The distinctions of intelligence & sensing seems pretty arbitrary, but it also seems IMHO that the behavior of this lower class of flying system has bent upwards to more resemble it's bigger historically manned/piloted counterpart.

dragonwriter 3y ago

> Bending the rules here, but the line between aircraft and cruise missile and drone feels like it's flexing & bending to me. Cruise missiles and (aerial) drones are both (unmanned) aircraft, and, yes, the lines between them essentially don't exist any more (especially since exoendable loitering munitions started being called “drones”, before which I would have argued drones are recoverable and cruise missiles / loitering munitions are expended in use and not intended to be recovered normally.) But usually when we talk about an “aircraft carrier”, we are usually talking about something that carries and recovers aircraft (eepecially manned aircraft), not just something that launches but does not recover expendable munitions. Other B-52s with air launched cruise mkssiles (and, heck, any plane carrying missiles) would be an “aircraft carrier”.

reaperman 3y ago
Even blurrier when the "unmanned" aircraft can be remotely controlled by a pilot in Las Vegas. Not manned, but still human-piloted.
jauntywundrkind 3y ago
I saw that distinction too & there's a lot of validity to it. But, I have no doubt a agm-158c could hypothetically go fly off, scout around, come back, and probably even have fine motor controls to fly close & get captured by some kind of dock. Grizzly to point this out, but also not all aircrafts in history have been designed to survive engagements. We don't say a Kamikaze suicide bomber isn't an aircraft because it doesnt land. We are however calling Ukraine's Aeroprakt A-22 based drone a drone, even though it's literally an aircraft airframe. But in general that there's a lot of things that could potentially be seen as aircraft carriers, as drones and missiles start to behave closer on the spectrum to aircrafts than to pure missiles. The distinctions of intelligence & sensing seems pretty arbitrary, but it also seems IMHO that the behavior of this lower class of flying system has bent upwards to more resemble it's bigger historically manned/piloted counterpart.