The eagle hasn’t exactly landed, but it did the next best thing. This afternoon, off the Virginia coast, the Navy’s experimental X-47B UCAS (Unmanned Combat Air System) became the first unmanned aircraft to do a “touch and go” on an aircraft carrier.
That’s a major milestone for the pioneering drone, which just this Tuesday conducted its first-ever launch off a carrier (the same carrier as in today’s test, the USS George H.W. Bush). But landing on an aircraft carrier is even harder than launching — you’re trying to hit a small, moving target (the deck) rather than a large, stationary one (the sky) — and it’s much more dangerous if it goes wrong — since you’re heading at high speed towards the ship full of people instead of away from it into the empty ocean. So as the program carefully worked up from one to the other, Navy officials decided a good intermediate step for the X-47B was a touch-and-go.
Children of the eighties like myself may remember the words “touch and go” as a double entendre in the absurd Kenny Loggins song “Highway to the Danger Zone,” which featured prominently in the almost equally absurd movie Top Gun. All macho posturing aside, it’s a difficult trick (which is probably why the Navy had no press aboard this time): An aircraft comes in as if landing, touches its wheels to the runway or flight deck, and then at the last moment pours on the power and take off again. Besides being an impressive stunt, it’s a maneuver often used to help novice pilots practice landing over and over again on a single flight.
The robot brain of the X-47B didn’t need to practice, exactly, but the Navy wanted to make sure it could track the deck of the aircraft carrier — a moving, rolling, pitching target — and align itself properly for a landing, before they actually tried to land. That will be the next milestone for the program, sometime later thus summer.
And beyond that? The X-47B is purely experimental and unarmed, but the Navy plans to start working on a combat-capable successor, the UCLASS (Unmanned Carrier-Launched Airborne Surveillance and Strike System), that will be the long-ranged, radar-penetrating cutting edge of the carrier air wing in future wars with high-tech foes — say, just for example, China. Ultimately what this program is about is “AirSea Battle” in the Persian Gulf and the Pacific.
Edited 6:30 pm, May 18 to embed Navy video and explain risks of carrier landings.