With hundreds of different species, from spy craft to airborne sheepherders, UAVs have in the past decade morphed into a full-blown kingdom of creatures deserving of its own taxonomy. Here is our complete guide.
Today 44 countries fly UAVs, according to P.W. Singer, a fellow at the public-policy think tank the Brookings Institution and author of Wired for War. Last year, the U.S. Air Force trained more UAV pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined. “Every so often in history, there’s a tech that comes along that rewrites the rules of the game,” Singer says. “I describe this as a revolution.”
But UAVs aren’t just multiplying—they’re getting faster, stronger and smarter with each generation. The new Avenger hunt-and-kill drone, for instance, is three times as fast as the original Predator, which has flown more than half a million hours in Iraq and Afghanistan. The hand-launched Ravens favored by the Army stream encrypted digital data, allowing many of the 7,000 birds currently in action to serve as an instant communication relay. On the civilian side, crafts like the hovering Embla will be available to scout disaster sites as early as this summer.
You may not have actually seen one yet, but you will (unless, of course, it doesn’t want to be seen). To give you a leg up on identification, here’s your field guide
to the latest UAV discoveries, as well as an overview of the most prevalent systems in use today.
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A field guide to the world's newest and most spectacular unmanned aircraft (supplemented online with a guide to current systems), plus reports from the frontiers of medicine, the definitive word on cellphone radiation and more.
Read the issue here.
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the Mantis is really a groundbreaking machine , talk about the movie stealth coming to life
the Mantis is really a groundbreaking machine , talk about the movie stealth coming to life
awesome uav's; some are really stretching boundaries of flight,embla(spooky as built craft in 2000 using almost identical fan ducting& lifting turbines);really good to see not going for standard types;
i'm surprised not to see more ugev's (unmanned ground effects vehicles); would be a good support craft for navy,like against pirates, gev's are used fairly widely in public domain,so technology is proven concept. being able to fly @ up to 300metres above sea & 300mph;would make for fast responce & near invisible to radar etc;
would really luv to see what they aren't showing us; you can betcha,skunkworks,darpa etc working on some really awesome smart uav's
If I've said it once, I've said it a dozen times. I like the tech, but this is NOT a good idea. Mark my words, kiddies, one day, and sooner than you think, some bad guy will figure out how to jack into one of these puppies and then they become UATV's (Unmanned Aerial Terrorist Vehicles)
I'm just sayin'...
Looks like flying one of those things thousands of miles awya must be a LOT of fun! Seems kinda cowardly though if you ask me. There is absolutely NO risk to the pilot of the drone yet he can still kill innocent civvies.
Jess
www.true-privacy.es.tc
@cowboy82
Right. Because that would NEVER happen to a MANNED aerial vehicle...
Great, brief guide, but there are many more being developed and available than mentioned here. I mean for one thing, you missed out some important ones that could be considered "the future" like the X-45B Pegasus and the Neuron.