Video: The Navy’s stealth drone makes its first arrested landing

Happy Monday. Here’s some drone history being made: This video shows the U.S. Navy’s X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator (UCAS-D) making its very first arrested landing. On May 4, the stealthy drone landed aboard a mock aircraft carrier flight deck, painted on a runway at the Navy’s airbase at Patuxent River, Md. The Northrop ...

Happy Monday. Here's some drone history being made: This video shows the U.S. Navy's X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator (UCAS-D) making its very first arrested landing. On May 4, the stealthy drone landed aboard a mock aircraft carrier flight deck, painted on a runway at the Navy's airbase at Patuxent River, Md.

Happy Monday. Here’s some drone history being made: This video shows the U.S. Navy’s X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator (UCAS-D) making its very first arrested landing. On May 4, the stealthy drone landed aboard a mock aircraft carrier flight deck, painted on a runway at the Navy’s airbase at Patuxent River, Md.

The Northrop Grumman-made X-47B is meant to prove that the Navy can operate a fighter jet-sized stealthy drone from aircraft carriers — paving the way for a fleet of similar aircraft to enter service around 2020 under a program called Unmanned Carrier Launched Surveillance and Strike or UCLASS. The Navy is testing the X-47B’s ability to do everything from safely taxi around a crowded flight deck to takeoff and land autonomously on a carrier’s four-acre deck (a human simply gives the plane clearance to land and then monitors the jet while a computer controls the actual maneuvers).

The X-47B is slated to fly from an actual aircraft carrier for the first time in the next year or so; the whole demonstration program will run until 2015.

Meanwhile, the sea service will soon give Northrop, Boeing, Lockheed, and General Atomics contracts to flesh out their designs for a stealthy, carrier-launched drone capable of flying through advanced air defenses, spying on potential targets, and even dropping bombs on them under the UCLASS program. That program is intended to incorporate the lessons learned from the Navy’s experience with the X-47B to field operational jets by the end of this decade.

John Reed is a national security reporter for Foreign Policy. He comes to FP after editing Military.com’s publication Defense Tech and working as the associate editor of DoDBuzz. Between 2007 and 2010, he covered major trends in military aviation and the defense industry around the world for Defense News and Inside the Air Force. Before moving to Washington in August 2007, Reed worked in corporate sales and business development for a Swedish IT firm, The Meltwater Group in Mountain View CA, and Philadelphia, PA. Prior to that, he worked as a reporter at the Tracy Press and the Scotts Valley Press-Banner newspapers in California. His first story as a professional reporter involved chasing escaped emus around California’s central valley with Mexican cowboys armed with lassos and local police armed with shotguns. Luckily for the giant birds, the cowboys caught them first and the emus were ok. A New England native, Reed graduated from the University of New Hampshire with a dual degree in international affairs and history.

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