Schurem, Flex.

Nonsense.

US aircraft are no less ‘designed by committee’ – with different user and interest groups inputting at every stage. They are certainly no less of a compromise.

Your English is always forgiven, guys, if I had to post in French it really would be impenetrable.

Si je devais ‘signaler’ dans la langue française, vous comprendriez vraiment ce qui est signifié par le mot ‘impenetrable’. Tous les membres français ici écrivent l’anglais très bien par comparaison avec moi.

L.Assap.

Corax was an ISTAR demonstrator that used the same FULLY AUTONOMOUS systems as the Raven.

Raven was fully autonomous, and first flew, autonomously, in December 2003.

With Herti, BAE achieved the only fully autonomous flight by a UAV in UK airspace with full Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) clearance.

Again with Herti, BAE and the RAF deployed a fully autonomous UAV system in Afghanistan (during the summer of 2007) as part of Project Morrigan – a joint initiative between the RAF Air Warfare Centre and BAE Systems. This programme aimed to integrate HERTI UAV systems into UK forces for short periods in order to develop Tactics, Techniques, Procedures and Doctrine for the integration of autonomous UAV/UCAV capabilities into existing joint manned/unmanned force structures.

The Morrigan programme was launched in September 2006, demonstrating that UAV autonomy was by then mature enough for operational exploitation. That should give you an idea of just how far ahead BAE is when it comes to the exploitation of autonomous UAVs, even if the HERTI itself is a conservative-looking platform.

The autonomy of Raven has been revealed in briefings by folk like Andy Wilson (Business Development Director for UAVs at BAE Systems), Martin Rowe-Willcocks, (head of export programmes for Military Autonomous Systems) and others at Paris, Farnborough, Singapore and Dubai. Rather than scraping around with powerpoint slides and your own interpretation of cuttings, give the PR folk at Warton a ring, and they’ll confirm it.

It is my personal belief that Raven was not the first fully autonomous BAE Systems UAV – only that it was the first such aircraft whose existence has been formally revealed.

Even Kestrel was effectively autonomous outside the ‘pattern’, but I believe that there was another programme parallelling Kestrel whose existance (like Halo and Replica, and indeed like Raven, Corax and even HERTI) won’t be unveiled for some years (I don’t mean Soarer, of course). It may have been a cornerstone of the UK MoD’s Autonomous Systems Technology Related Airborne Evaluation and Assessment airspace access programme.

I say “may” as it’s possible that the technolgies and systems were flown on manned platforms acting as ‘surrogate’ autonomous UAVs. Certainly the UK has gone much further that anyone else in flying ‘teamed’ autonomous UAVs with other platforms, and in using surrogates to pioneer the routine use of Uninhabited Air Vehicles in all classes of airspace WITHOUT the need for restrictive, specialised or non-routine conditions of operation.

Some of the most relevant UAV/UCAV development has been achieved using manned BAC One Elevens and Tornados, for example, though the Brits have also done more operational flying with ‘for real’ autonomous UAVs, too.

Whether or not an actual yet-to-be-revealed UAV platform exists, additional to those we know about, is irrelevant in the narrow context of this debate.

But it can be stated with confidence that this is certainly not an area where Dassault enjoys a lead over the perfidious Brits!

What is planification?

Harrier does NOT have the Jag’s ROUGH field capability, at all. A big Pegasus and those great big intakes make for a FOD nightmare, so that the Harrier II is great for ships, or short PREPARED strips, but not for UNPREPARED or rough strips

The Harriers couldn’t even use Cairo West, because of FOD concerns, when the Jaguars could.

Same is true for the F-35B, which also needs a surface with a higher CBR (California Bearing Ratio) than Harrier or Jag.

Corrosion and hub cracks were associated with the earliest Merlins (eg Canadian), and not with the later aircraft with a heavier MTOW and redesigned hub.

The H-71 won VXX because it was the best suited of the three competitors – faster, quieter and more capacious. All the same reasons that should have given it CSAR-X as well.

Nice use of the phrase “a tad”, if I might say so.
😉

Actually, the SAAF Mirage F1 was shot down by one of the Cuban-piloted, Cuban-supplied MiG-23s, and not by an EAST German pilot. They lost another to a SAM.

Off hand I don’t know whether the losses were F1CZs or AZs.

The Iraqis lost several F1s, too.

I suspect that overall, kill:loss rates were about even.