A UAV Drone Versus a C-130 in a Mid-Air Collision - We Know Who Won But More Programming Needed

There is an old famous Hollywood airplane movie called; "The Crowded Skies" and in the movie there is a midair collision, and just prior to the midair collision the pilots are talking about that potential eventuality, and what they might do if that situation ever occurred where two aircraft were coming at each other head on, and at the last minute they had decide which way to go to avoid the collision. Most all aviators and those in the aviation industry have seen the movie, and it is a classic.

In the United States we have the Federal Aviation Administration, and lots of aviation radars, satellite systems, and great communication to prevent midair collisions. This makes aviation safer, and it also makes air travel and airliners extremely safe for the passengers by giving more confidence to airline passengers and the industry. However, what about in the modern battlespace where you have aircraft flying around doing various missions during times of war?

Things can get rather dangerous because there are different military operations, some of them secret, and not all the various aircraft will know where everyone else is. Now then, today we have technologies for Net-Centric Warfare, which means everyone is in constant communication, but what happens if all of the airplanes in the battlespace are not flown by pilots, and some of them are flown by computers, or tele-robotically from thousands of miles away? Theoretically, everything should be known, thus no problems right? Hmm, well then.

There was an interesting article recently in AOL Defense titled; "Drone Collides Over Afghanistan With U.S. Warplane," b y Colin Clark published on August 17, 2011. The article stated;

"Washington: A relatively small unmanned aircraft struck a C-130 cargo plane over Afghanistan, injuring no one but raising questions anew about whether drones can fly safely in American airspace," and "The drone, a Shadow made by a unit of Textron Systems, boasts a maximum operating altitude of about 15,000 feet but usually operates at lower altitudes to perform its tactical reconnaissance mission. No one was injured in the collision, but the C-130 did make an emergency landing. The 12-foot drone went down."

Now then, although this was the first major accidental mid-air collision involving an unmanned aerial vehicle with an aircraft piloted by human pilots, it is a wake-up call. It also means that we need more coordination between branches of our military, and these unmanned aerial vehicles need some sort of collision avoidance system which that takes over from its tele-robotic operator for a few seconds to get out of harm's way, in other words it needs to go autonomous, avoid the potential collision, and then hand itself back to its operator or controller. Please consider all this and think on it.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes writing 24,500 articles by August 24th or 25th will be difficult because all the letters on his keyboard are now worn off now..

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