Transforming planes into flying aircraft carriers
could reasonably achieve within that timeframe, but also how to best demonstrate this functionality to potential users and transition partners. These notional plans should include rough order-of-magnitude (ROM) cost and schedule information, as well as interim risk reduction and demonstration events to evaluate program progress and validate system feasibility and interim capabilities.
Technology development beyond these three areas will be considered so long as it supports the RFI’s goals. DARPA is particularly interested in engaging nontraditional contributors to help develop leap-ahead technologies in the focus areas above, as well as other technologies that could potentially improve both the survivability and effectiveness of future manned and unmanned air systems.
Responses are due 26 November 2014 to DARPA-SN-15-06@darpa.mil by 4:00 PM Eastern Time. All technical and administrative correspondence and questions regarding this project and how to respond to the RFI should be sent to DARPA-SN-15-06@darpa.mil
Yahoo News notes that this is not the first time the U.S. military has sought to build a carrier in the sky.
“This idea goes back to the 1920s,” said James Lewis, director of the Strategic Technologies Program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “If you think back to dirigibles, they used to have small aircraft, a one-man fighter, that would hook up to them.”
The US Navy built two dirigibles in the late 1920s — rigid airships which could carry a small squadron of Sparrowhawk biplanes inside, with the planes launching from the dirigible after being lowered by a trapeze device. The biplane would return by latching onto a hook on the belly of the mothership.
Both airships were destroyed in crashes in the 1930s, killing dozens and closing the chapter on the experiment.
Thirty years later, in the 1960s, the CIA commissioned Lockheed Martin to manufacture the D-21, a camera-equipped surveillance drone which was supposed to launch from another jet and, later, from a B-52 bomber. The idea was for the D-21 to release a sensitive camera over China and then self-destruct, while the camera would be retrieved at a later date. The project was abandoned in 1971 after repeated failures (the drone would not self-destruct, or the camera module could not be surreptitiously.
Lewis told Yahoo News that the flying carrier could allow the United States to use of drones in areas where the United States has no access to nearby airfields, but that recovering a drone in mid-air remains a daunting technical challenge.
Experts note that the carrier concept fits into what is called the “marsupial” category of robots. At a recent arms show, for example, China demonstrated a prototype of an unmanned armored vehicle which carries two smaller robots inside — a tracked robot equipped with a machine gun and a flying surveillance quadcopter.
The U.S, military is already moving closer to an underwater drone carrier, with unmanned aircraft launched from a torpedo or missile tube, author Peter Singer notes.
Last year the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory had successfully launched a drone from a submerged submarine, with the robotic plane flying out of a Tomahawk missile tube and its wings unfolding origami style.
