Puppet Masters

Boeing's Phantom Eye Makes First Autonomous Flight

Tiffany Kaiser
DailyTech
Tue, 05 Jun 2012 12:30 UTC

After the Phantom Eye landed, it was slightly damaged when the landing gear hit the lakebed and broke

Boeing sent its Phantom Eye unmanned airborne system (UAS) on its first autonomous flight last week.

Boeing's Phantom Eye is a hydrogen-powered unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that is propeller-driven. The aircraft uses two 2.3 liter, four-cylinder engines capable of pushing 300 horsepower total and can loiter above a target for up to 10 days. Its main purpose is to gather information or conduct attack missions.

The Phantom Eye took off at 6:22 a.m. PST for a 28-minute flight. It reached an altitude of 4,080 feet and a speed of 62 knots. The flight took place June 1 at NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California.

"This day ushers in a new era of persistent Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaisance (ISR) where an unmanned aircraft will remain on station for days at a time providing critical information and services," said Darryl Davis, president of Boeing Phantom Works. "This flight puts Boeing on a path to accomplish another aerospace first -- the capability of four days of unrefueled, autonomous flight."

After the Phantom Eye landed, it was slightly damaged when the landing gear hit the lakebed and broke. But overall, the flight was a success.

Previous to the June 1 flight, the Phantom Eye took part in a series of tests throughout April, such as navigation and control, pilot interface, and mission planning.

The Phantom Eye used for demonstration purposes has a 150-foot wingspan and can carry a 450-pound payload. It can fly up to 96 hours without needing to land, but Boeing is looking to make a new model in 2014 that can fly up to 240 hours without landing.

Comment: The product of a nation of free people, unmoved by fear, proud and honorable, or the product of a pathological, fearful group of psychopaths and those ponerized by their influence?

Reader Comments

Monotonic · 2012-06-06T01:20:02Z

The link is broken

It should be, based on the corrupted hyperlink:

[Link]

Rowan Cocoan · 2012-06-06T04:51:03Z

Ans."B" Mil.Ind.Complex, Twain,& La Fue

Ans."B" Duh. Military Industrial Complex,

Like most Brevardians, I am a child of the Military Industrial Complex, and like practically all my friends here, I was born and lived in California until the early 1960's. My father worked at Edwards whilst we lived in the desert nearby. (Fond, fond memories of that place.) Then, the Space Program brought us to this mosquito ridden and hellishly hot sandbar. But I'm still here and no gun to my head, eh what? (At least not yet.)

But I still hope to believe (but more than ever doubt) that it wasn't always ALL broken. It seemed and seems to me that at the top of American government in my youth there was a power struggle between the non-ponerized good folks, and the "others.' Between those who had truly seen war, and those who had waged it from the vantage of safety, and yet had gloried in it. (Those on the fronts never saw glory, only slaughter.)*

And it seems that the ponerization of our now sad country has been completed and the good guys lost. I do not have the solution, for, as per Twain's Mysterious Stranger:

"Oh, it's true. I know your race. It is made up of sheep. It is governed by minorities, seldom or never by majorities. It suppresses its feelings and its beliefs and follows the handful that makes the most noise. Sometimes the noisy handful is right, sometimes wrong; but no matter, the crowd follows it. The vast majority of the race, whether savage or civilized, are secretly kind-hearted and shrink from inflicting pain, but in the presence of the aggressive and pitiless minority they don't dare to assert themselves. Think of it! One kind-hearted creature spies upon another, and sees to it that he loyally helps in iniquities which revolt both of them. Speaking as an expert, I know that ninety-nine out of a hundred of your race were strongly against the killing of witches when that foolishness was first agitated by a handful of pious lunatics in the long ago. And I know that even to-day, after ages of transmitted prejudice and silly teaching, only one person in twenty puts any real heart into the harrying of a witch. And yet apparently everybody hates witches and wants them killed. [Little different than our War on Drugs, eh? I pray that maybe.]... "Some day a handful will rise up on the other side and make the most noise - perhaps even a single daring man with a big voice and a determined front will do it - and in a week all the sheep will wheel and follow him, and witch-hunting will come to a sudden end.|
"Monarchies, aristocracies, and religions are all based upon that large defect in your race - the individual's distrust of his neighbor, and his desire, for safety's or comfort's sake, to stand well in his neighbor's eye. These institutions will always remain, and always flourish, and always oppress you, affront you, and degrade you, because you will always be and remain slaves of minorities. There was never a country where the majority of the people were in their secret hearts loyal to any of these institutions."
I did not like to hear our race called sheep, and said I did not think they were.
"Still, it is true, lamb," said Satan. "Look at you in war - what mutton you are, and how ridiculous!"
"In war? How?"
"There has never been a just one, never an honorable one - on the part of the instigator of the war. I can see a million years ahead, and this rule will never change in so many as half a dozen instances. The loud little handful - as usual - will shout for the war. The pulpit will - warily and cautiously - object - at first; the great, big, dull bulk of the nation will rub its sleepy eyes and try to make out why there should be a war, and will say, earnestly and indignantly, "It is unjust and dishonorable, and here is no necessity for it." Then the handful will shout louder. A few fair men on the other side will argue and reason against the war with speech and pen, and at first will have a hearing and be applauded; but it will not last long; those others will outshout them, and presently the anti-war audiences will thin out and lose popularity. Before long you will see this curious thing: the speakers stoned from the platform, and free speech strangled by hordes of furious men who in their secret hearts are still at one with those stoned speakers - as earlier - but do not dare to say so. And now the whole nation - pulpit and all - will take up the war-cry, and shout itself hoarse, and mob any honest man who ventures to open his mouth; and presently such mouths will cease to open. Next the statesmen will invent cheap lies, putting the blame upon the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities, and will diligently study them, and refuse to examine any refutations of them; and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just, and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception."

Sound familar to recent events, say in, for example Iraq? I dare say Twain was speaking from his own experience in objecting to America's freeing of, then CONQUEST of, the Philippines. God I would have loved to have met that man!

R.C.

* Want to appreciate the less "glorious" side of war? Read this! (You'll thank me after crying.) Henri Barbusse's "La Fue" (Under Fire, The Story of a Squad.) It's the first published memoir from WWI, published in 1916 and free, here: [Link] The only reason you HAVEN'T heard of it was because he later got sick of Western Hypocrisy, and moved to the USSR. He thus became Das Verboten and the Western MSM has ne'r mentioned him since.

R.C.

Rowan Cocoan · 2012-06-06T05:01:51Z

Gotta add b/c it's So SOTT!

Twain, farther on...

Satan was accustomed to say that our race lived a life of continuous and uninterrupted self-deception. It duped itself from cradle to grave with shams and delusions which it mistook for realities, and this made its entire life a sham. Of the score of fine qualities which it imagined it had and was vain of, it really possessed hardly one. It regarded itself asgold, and was only brass. One day when he was in this vein he mentioned a detail - the sense of humor. I cheered up then, and took issue. I said we possessed it.

"There spoke the race!" he said; "always ready to claim what it hasn't got, and mistake its ounce of brass filings for a ton of gold-dust. You have a mongrel perception of humor, nothing more; a multitude of you possess that. This multitude see the comic side of a thousand low-grade and trivial things - broad incongruities, mainly; grotesqueries, absurdities, evokers of the horse-laugh. The ten thousand high-grade comicalities which exist in the world are sealed from their dull vision. Will a day come when the race will detect the funniness of these juvenilities and laugh at them - and by laughing at them destroy them? For your race, in its poverty, has unquestionably one really effective weapon - laughter. Power, money, persuasion, supplication, persecution - these can lift at a colossal humbug - push it a little - weaken it a little, century by century; but only laughter can blow it to rags and atoms at a blast. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. You are always fussing and fighting with your other weapons. Do you ever use that one? No; you leave it lying rusting. As a race, do you ever use it at all? No; you lack sense and the courage."

hukk phinn · 2012-06-06T11:03:15Z

now I'm not sure...

if this behemoth waste of tax $$$ can drop bombs or fire missiles, but there's one thing you can bet on... any man, woman or child in the "kill zone" or that's "targeted" could not give 2 good shits if the bombs are dropped from 65 feet or 65000 feet... as well, the military panty waste baby killer sitting at nellis afb could not give 2 good shits about the families he/she destroys... I wonder how they sleep at night- both sides that is

OldUncleDave · 2012-06-06T14:52:40Z

Payload

This latest hunter-killer robot has a (claimed) payload of 450 pounds. Four hellfire missiles weigh a total of 424 pounds.

l_e_cox · 2012-06-07T01:40:39Z

It looks like a big bomb...

...with a wing pinned on top of it.

But I guess it's surveillance-only.

They could get there a lot cheaper by training a bunch of soldiers to exteriorize.

However, beings who begin to connect up with their true spiritual abilities tend to become more ethical.

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jcsmalz

Puppet Masters

Boeing's Phantom Eye Makes First Autonomous Flight

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