I spent dozens of hours consulting with the producers of this documentary, literally taking them through almost every aspect of drone warfare and unmanned combat aircraft, including their evolution, ways of operation, specific differences in capabilities amongst the types in service, their future potential and so on. The team and Pangloss Films was extremely serious about wanting to understand, and thus hopefully convey to a layman audience, the changing world of air combat as we know it. The amount of detail they requested from me was absolutely stunning, in some ways even more in depth than what I discuss about on this site. So make sure to tune in Wednesday on you local PBS station and check the show out. I have not seen it yet either so maybe we can all come back here the next day and discuss what was presented. I put a good piece of myself into this thing so hopefully it is reflected well in the depth and accuracy of the final product.
http://pressroom.pbs.org/Programs/n/NOVA/4003-Rise-of-the-Drones.aspx
Congrats on this really cool opportunity, Ty. I’m really looking forward to watching this program and seeing your influence.
Cool show. You can stream it at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/rise-of-the-drones.html as of this writing.
I don’t think I’ll be adding it to my video collection like Nova: Battle of the X Planes (which you can also find online by Hulu and other streaming video sites) but it’s a good episode of Nova all the same. Like how they mentioned the RQ-170 Sentinel and UAV’s crash rate vs. manned U-2 spyplanes among other things. This was one of three(?) websites to plug “Rise of the Drones” glad I was able to watch it.
Liked it up until the conclusion, they are wrong on autonomy and I am going to tell you why.