Originally Posted by
rickair7777
What he said. At one point the pred fleet had suffered a 50% loss rate, with only one or two of those combat related. That's cost effective (sort of, by military standards) for continuous ISR, but not for pax ops, or commercial cargo ops.
They also found out that they cannot actually fly them safely over long-range comms (ie SATCOM). Even the speed of light suffers latency over satellite ranges, and through comms hardware. You can manage the FMS and mission by SATCOM, but they had to go back to line-of-sight for landings.
So what genius had the bright idea to run real-time UAV control over SATCOM? I mean best case to geo-stationary orbit you're talking 500ms of latency. I haven't done the math in a while but if memory serves at lower look angles, it's usually more like 650-700, sometimes even 750. So we're talking 2/3rds to 3/4 of a second - that's worse reaction time than being drunk.
And shifting gears back to the original topic of conversation: not to mention the cyber-security nightmare that is an airliner you can potentially remotely control. You'd think we'd have learned from 9/11, but I guess if you tell some idiot there's profit involved the "danger Will Robinson" part of their imagination shuts off...