[url]http://www.msnbc.com/news/756199.asp[/url]

I just find this stuff so cool...  Especially that Black Widow thing.

thank you FM...another brick in the wall

"Unlike the crewed planes it may replace, the X-45 would be partially autonomous. Its pilot — [b]who may fly several planes at once[/b] — would remain on the ground, out of harm’s way."

That'd be a neat trick in a dogfight.

Especally considering that on the ground is the least safest place to be in a war. Look how easy it is to destroy a bunker these days, and what is [i]already[/i] the first thing we bomb when we attack somone?  Their C3 system!

Of course its fine as long as all you are doing is dropping bombs on fuzzy wuzzies that cant shoot down our existing manned aircraft.

We wont even get into the problems of remote controll over distance, the delay involved, the problems of jamming and interference.

Now if they really grew a brain, they would install the control technology into the F-22s two currently unoccupied computer bays and route them so that the F-22 pilot could control several X-45s through the F-22s fire control system. The drones would essentially fly formation with the F-22 and would therefore always be in line of sight where they could be communicated with via difficult to jam or intercept millimetric wave data links. Then you have a drone controller that is truely a hard target.