4 ms·
$25k per flight hour is a lot more than what drones cost
by spongebobstoes 6mo ago
$25k per flight hour is a lot more than what drones cost
- benoau 6mo agoWhat's crazy is there's lots of videos of Ukranians shooting drones from open-cockpit propeller planes that barely cost more than the drones! I think in a serious drone war we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol.
- rjbwork 6mo agoThen you send a swarm and fly a few sacrificial drones them into the airplanes.
- benoau 6mo agoYeah but that drone swarm costs as much as the Cesna so it neutralizes the cost advantage / disadvantage.
- chung8123 6mo agoA pilot is pretty expensive.
- defrost 6mo agoIn convential modern terms, sure. In WWII terms they come as a function of aircraft production capability as the stategy was to keep putting fresh young faces in trainer cockpits and advancing everybody that didn't crash after a quick run down of controls and a couple of paired instructor flights. I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go".
- lmm 6mo ago> I had a couple of aunts that were both members of the UK/AU Women's Auxiliary Air Force (1939 - 1949) and they each had rudimentary training for spitfires, heavy bombers, jets, etc that came down to mere hours and "see how you go". Worth noting that their mission was delivery flights with the produced aircraft (a handful of them saw combat, because if you're flying a fighter plane into a warzone your guns might as well be loaded, but it wasn't the main aim). Those who were intentionally flying into combat got a little more training AIUI.
- defrost 6mo agoAnd recovery flights of downed / incorrectly landed (wrt airfield) aircraft, crossing active zones while unarmed, international delivery across the globe, and officially no fighting stuff ... although that was somewhat divorced from practice in the asian theatre. Still, thanks for chipping in with a "no true Scotswoman" pilot variation - of course bombardiers got training in sighting, navigators in map reading .. largely at that time combat pilots got experience or got dead while exposed to all the barrack room theory about tactics that may or may not survive enemy contact.
- benoau 6mo agoThey're not fighter planes in Ukraine they're people with conventional weapons shooting at the drones when the planes get close!
- thephyber 6mo agoA drone swarm can take out a swarm of Cessnas. Realistically a Cessna single prop is roughly $100k (average between good condition used and some new ones). A Ukrainian interceptor drone is about $2k + cost of munition. And the Cessna requires an airfield, so it is geo-fenced, while an interceptor drone can take off from flat land or the back of a truck. People need to wake up and realize the economics of war just changed by several orders of magnitude.
- rounce 6mo agoWe're already moving beyond that to having interceptor drones which are cheaper and far more expendable.
- dgroshev 6mo agoIn a serious war drone factories are getting bombed (by F-35s) and there is no need to handle a never-ending stream of drones. The war in Ukraine is special because neither side is capable of air supremacy. Note that the original article doesn't say anywhere that F-35-like capability is not needed.
- deleted 6mo ago[deleted]
- fc417fc802 6mo agoSo Ukraine isn't a serious war then? And I take it you believe we failed to employ that strategy in Iran ... why, exactly? The alternative interpretation being that isn't how things work. Swarms of cheap drones are the new reality thus appropriate countermeasures are required on the front lines.
- PearlRiver 6mo agoAmerica does not want to prepare for that kind of conflict. It wants B2 bombers because those look cool when they fly over during the Superbowl. Ukraine is a real war and it is about men and women crawling in the mud constantly terrified of getting blown up. It is literally battle of the Somme again. How do you recruit college kids for that?
- doodlebugging 6mo agoYou don't recruit them, you draft them.
- bdangubic 6mo agoBone spurts will take care of that draft (I’ve read that in the President’s Biography…)
- expedition32 6mo agoThank god I'm too old. Although I suppose you're never too old for a human wave assault...
- defrost 6mo ago> we would just have fleets of Cesnas flying around with a person hanging out the door with a shotgun lol. Pfft, get real - Robinson R22 light broomstick choppers with muster pilots and crop dusting family STOLs make far more sense for their agility, ground hugging, and rough short take off / landing field capabilities. That quibble aside, I can see things going that way, until flooding waves of many drones push up the human life cost past being able to respond. Either way, they still need to be backed by some agile radar capabilities - variations of the E-7A Wedgetail design for ground and air to keep sensing on the hop.
- jcgrillo 6mo agoThis wasn't unlike how the U.S. did it in Vietnam. They would have a small, unarmed helicopter fly low with an observer and an M-16 to spot (or more likely draw fire) with some Cobra and/or Huey gunships higher up. When the little bird found some targets the big ones would come down and lay waste to the entire area.
- rasz 6mo agoIn a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship off your coast will open hidden flaps and unleash 10K drones all at once erasing couple bases before they even know whats up.
- krige 6mo agoEnough with the ace combat fanfics. In a serious drone war a neutral cargo ship would not be allowed to hang around with potentially a shitload of drones in its containers.
- rounce 6mo agoIn a serious drone war, the cargo ship wouldn't know it was carrying containers full of drones, as we saw in Ukraine's Operation Spiderweb[0]. 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb
- smcin 6mo agoWouldn't that be the war crime of perfidy, similar to when the US used a secret plane painted as a civilian aircraft to sink one of the Venezuelan boats 9/2025?
- rasz 6mo agoLike that tens of times unaffiliated cargo ships dragged anchor for tens of kilometers to dredge fiberoptic cables in the Baltic.
- Nasrudith 6mo agoWarships are explicitly allowed to use false flags at sea, provided they lower them and raise their true flag before launching an attack. So all that would change to be legal would be to raise the flag and then unleash the drone swarms. I'm not quite sure if just putting up a military flag on a civilian transport ship makes it count as a warship or not though.
- thephyber 6mo agoIt’s a cat-and-mouse game. Drones won’t stay ignorant of fighters shooting them down for long. It’s a lot cheaper to give them a rear camera than to just tolerate them getting shot down indefinitely.
- elihu 6mo agoThe Super Turcano is a prop-driven aircraft that's often suggested for this role.
- ceejayoz 6mo agoI wouldn't want to field those around a bunch of FPV interceptor drones.
- ErroneousBosh 6mo agoIn the Second World War, the most effective defence against Germany's V1 was getting a fast plane to fly alongside it with its wingtip under the V1's wingtip. They didn't actually "bump" the V1s, just got one wing into a kind of "ground effect" which caused it to roll beyond the capability of the gyro to compensate. They're doing this to take down all sorts of stuff the Russians are lobbing at Ukraine.