History is made every day. If you, for example, watch sports and pay attention to the commentators, you will most likely be inundated with an avalanche of factoids about how some player just made sports history. A player did a thing that has never been done at 9PM on a Tuesday in March; this kind of history is more or less superfluous. Off the coast of Virginia, on the deck of the USS George H. W. Bush, the US Navy made actual history yesterday. It performed the first successful launch of an unmanned aircraft from the deck of a carrier. The flight lasted for an hour and five minutes. Essentially, the Navy just got a robot plane to take off and fly around on its own.
After the hour-long joyride, the jet, an X-47B, safely landed at Maryland’s Naval Air Station Patuxent River. Unfortunately, the X-47B didn’t land on the carrier after the flight, but no similar drones have managed that just yet. However, that is what the Navy is gearing up toward, and this test flight is just one preliminary step before attempting to land the unmanned aircraft on a carrier this summer. The drone did attempt two landings on the carrier, but both were waved off, as the landings were deemed not safe enough at the time. The Navy noted that the jet completed various successful landings on a terrestrial simulator, but it ended up not being enough just yet. The drone, almost as if pitched by an infomercial host, has wings that can be folded in to reduce the overall size of the craft, making it easier to store on the carrier once successful landings are made possible.
The X-47B flight also marked some other momentous occasions in the world of flight. It became the first tailless aircraft to take off from a carrier deck, as well as being the first jet with a low observable stealth profile to launch from a carrier deck. Along with those feats, the X-47B has now become the first autonomous, unmanned jet to fly in the US military.
For the momentous occasion, though, the X-47B is not meant for actual, active service, and currently only serves as a demonstrator of the working technology. Thankfully, the technology — intended for active service or not — is quite impressive, especially if you dream of a terrifying world where autonomous, unmanned military stealth aircraft freely roam the sky.