My question is, why drones? Why not manned aircraft? Unmanned drones are expensive and are intended for missions too dangerous to risk pilots on. Is Libyan airspace that dangerous? It's a no-fly zone, which means anything the radar sees taking off gets a fighter vectored onto it, and it's dead. That leaves SAM. Is the SAM problem that bad in Libya?
The drone pilot's vision is restricted to a TV set. I maintain a pilot in the cockpit, with binoculars, has a better chance of spotting targets, and aiming weapons accurately than a drone operator half a world away, sitting in an air conditioned trailer in Nevada.
2 comments:
Hi Dave,
Interestingly enough they're using Predators now because the Libyan Army are using civvies as human shields. The predator can loiter above a target for quite some time feeding back hi-res video to make sure they're blasting away bad guys.
While a bigger plane can drop a lot more bombs, NATO can't drop a 2,000 pounder next to a building full of civvies. One hellfire missile usually equals one blown up tech.
There was an article on the BBC a few days ago about it.
It's not the bigger plane, it's the eyes in the cockpit. You can find more targets, and hit more targets, if you are there, rather than watching a TV screen on the other side of the world.
Predator is a low performance airplane, roughly Piper cub class. Plenty of in-production light planes can carry Hellfire, small diameter bomb, even Standard ARM. I'm saying a two place light plane with 10 hour endurance would do a better job than Predator, so long as the air defenses have been well suppressed.
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