Talking medium and up sized drones, they are run as a team exercise (think a bomber crew with flight engineering and a shift change during the mission) and you still generally need a external pilot for launch recovery as well as internal pilots. You can attempt to automate your way out but that can actually make things worse, for example auto-land functions turn out to have as much trouble in landing (as an example) as human pilots because it is actually HARD. Another lesson learned is the more you try to automate the flight vehicle the more you just push human workload upstream (into mission planning) and as Global Hawk illustrates that has it's own set of problems. Basically the drone community is rediscovering all the old automation challenges of the `glass cockpit' with a few new one's thrown in for good measure.
All that said they can do some things much better than other platforms (e.g. persistency) and I expect that the solutions to the problems we're working on currently, such as true autonomous flight in mixed airspace, will spill back into manned aviation in due course.
]]>The key point is not that Trump has magically tapped into some deep vein of pre-existing misogyny (or racism) but that when a dominant group feel their place in the sun is threatened they tend to act badly. How else explain how nation that voted for Obama twice turns around and votes for his complete antithesis?
Looking at the rolling Woke-SJW Auto-da-fé that is the Democratic nomination process I kind of think they haven't got this...
Link. Status threat, not economic hardship, explains the 2016 presidential vote. Link. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1718155115
]]>I guess my partial explanation (and opinion) of the current craziness on is that there's been an ongoing shift in western societies since the 70's and we've just hit the rapid phase change point. This change is driven mostly by the transition in advanced (western) countries to an information technology economy, some by globalisation and has resulted in a strongly bifurcated labour class of winners and losers. This leaves traditional parties floundering because what 'the people' believe and want doesn't actually line up neatly according to the old left-right list of concerns.
That's why the Tories will likely self destruct if they can't deliver Brexit, it's why Australia's Labour was (narrowly) defeated in the last election and why the Democrats could be bound for electoral defeat if they don't actually recognise that they have to win the electoral college. To survive they'll all have to reinvent themselves. I suspect that's exactly what BJ* is in the process of doing with (or to) the Tories even as we speak.
*Freely admit he could also be a blithering idiot.
]]>Mostly unstated by commentators and analysts but the best predictor for how people voted in 2016 was simply how they voted in 2012. One study found that (totally unsurprisingly) 92% of those surveyed who voted for Obama in 2012 also voted for Clinton in 2016. That makes explaining the remaining variance in voter preferences a challenging exercise.
]]>Here's the link to the study by Mansfield and Mutz.
]]>Matt
]]>Direct vectored jet engines are so last century.
A turbo electric aircraft splits the turbo engine from the propulsion array which is in the form of a wide array of small electric fans. This gives a high effective bypass and total area. The wide fan array area also maximizes boundary layer ingestion and wake filling improving efficiency and reducing drag. The airframe shields fam noise and the fans exhaust can also feed a flush vectoring propulsion nozzle. The Turbo generators are wing root mounted with an upper wing exhaust. Again reduces noise.
As it turns out generic STOL performance is quite good without doing anything. Serendipitously if we put the fan nacelle location on top of the vehicle, at low speed the cruise optimized fan inlets see increased flow acceleration. This upper surface suction increase at low speed high power then delays stall separation and gives you much improved max lift coefficient. Sweet!
]]>Electric powered or hybrid for short hops. Liquid hydrogen fuelled turbogenerator and superconducting distributed electric propulsors for long haul. Blended wing aero forms and boundary layer ingestion propulsion improvements. VSTOL capabilities to reduce aircraft noise.
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