Air Force Plans for All-Drone Future

Is the day of the hot-shot fighter jock nearly done?

An Air Force study, released without much fanfare on Wednesday, suggests that tomorrow’s dogfighers might not have pilots in the cockpit. The Unmanned Aircraft System Flight Plan. which sketches out possible drone development through the year 2047, comes with plenty of qualifiers. But it envisions a radical future. In an acronym-dense 82 pages, the Air Force explains how ever-larger and more sophisticated flying robots could eventually replace every type of manned aircraft in its inventory — everything from speedy, air-to-air fighters to lumbering bombers and tankers.

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Homeland Security Drone Patrolling NNY

A monitor inside an operations trailer shows a close-up view of a boat skimming across the water on Lake Ontario.

The image was taken from an unmanned aircraft more than three miles away.

A Predator B Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) has been temporarily based at Fort Drum since early June in an experiment by the U.S. Customs and Border Protection Office.

The Department of Homeland Security is using the extensive restricted air space over Fort Drum to test whether the drone could be a good fit along this stretch of the northern border.

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Big Brother Spy Planes That Track the Taliban May Soon Hover Over Your Home

Pilotless planes used to track the Taliban could soon be hovering over our streets, it has emerged.

Remote-controlled drones are already used widely by the military. Now ministers believe they are likely to become 'increasingly useful' for police work.

Armed with heat-seeking cameras, the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles would hover hundreds of feet in the air, gathering intelligence and watching suspects.

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US Drone Attacks Originate in Pakistan

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that the unmanned US air force drones operating in Pakistan are flown from an air base inside the country, a Press TV correspondent reported.

"As I understand it, these are flown out of a Pakistani base," she said at a hearing for Dennis Blair, the new director of national intelligence on Friday.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) declined to comment, but former US intelligence officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the information, confirmed that Feinstein's account was accurate.

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