The Drone That Launched Itself From a Carrier

[00:00:05]In a few seconds, this aircraft is going to be thrown off the front of a moving ship at full power. There is nobody inside it. How does a machine with no pilot tell anyone it is ready to launch?

[00:00:17]It flashes its lights. Where a human pilot salutes the catapult officer to confirm everything is ready. The aircraft blinks its wing tip lights instead. That is the entire go ahead. A machine confirming to a person that it is ready to be fired off of a moving carrier. The catapult sees the flash and responds with the signal to fire. No stick, no throttle, no brake pedal.

[00:00:39]Nobody on this ship is flying that aircraft with their hands. The person responsible for everything that happens next is holding a mouse.

[00:00:47]This aircraft runs on 3.4 million lines of code. A click starts the engines. A click taxis it forward. A click sends it down to the catapult. This is the X-47B.

[00:00:59]Nothing about the ship changed. Only what was sitting on it. This was not the only first. Two months later, it landed the same way. No pilot, no remote stick.

[00:01:08]It caught the wire itself going from 145 knots to a dead stop in under 350 ft. In 2015, it took fuel from a tanker in midair using its own systems to hold position and make the connection. Nobody was flying the X-47 for that maneuver.

[00:01:24]The tanker did have a crew. This was the autonomous half of the handshake. Not two robots refueling each other. But before any of that, before this aircraft was trusted to fly itself anywhere, it had to prove something far simpler. This is the same aircraft months earlier. It did not taxi onto the carrier itself. It did not drive up the elevator on its own. It was lifted aboard by a crane by cargo. Nobody trusted it to move on a flight deck yet. Before it ever flew, the Navy needed to know it could simply exist around crew without becoming a hazard. Then it left the carrier deck under its own control, nobody touching it, roughly the size of a F/A-18 Super Hornet, no tail, a 62-ft wingspan that folds so it fits in the same hanger base as manned fighters. The whole demonstrator program cost an estimated $813 million. Here's the part that does not get said enough. This aircraft proved a fully autonomous combat-size drone could launch, land, and refuel itself on a moving carrier. It was never equipped to fight. It was never sent anywhere. The program meant to turn this into an operational combat aircraft was shelved.

[00:02:31]That was proven possible over a decade ago. Imagine what they actually have now.