I've been designing, building, flying and mostly crashing RC aircraft for most of the last decade and I can attest to the fact it is harder to fly these aircraft than a real plane. It is however much easier for the RC craft to fly--meaning that scale of size and ability makes it much harder for full sized craft to fly than RC craft. It's very easy for example, to make a 3D RC craft that can copter and accelerate straight upward on a prop--something almost no prop powered aircraft can do.Roger wrote:If teenaged boys can fly these RC models, I just cant seem to be impressed by the RQ-170 or any other effort in this direction.
Personally, I think the loss of the Sentinel is a tragedy. First of all, designing a really good flying wing is not simple. It's extremely complex. At RC scale its simple, but at the size of that craft, to have sufficient control and supreme stealth and flight endurance, that requires severe optimization. The craft won't tell anyone how to optimize for other missions than the one it was designed for, but it certainly does say how to build a recon drone. Just knowing the camber and cord of the wing is huge and if those are variable, this would be a true nightmare of classified tech disclosure. The pics recently released on the Sentinel say just what one would expect--this is a superbly engineered machine. It's truly tragic Iran has one.
Second things is, no matter what any source might say, odds are the entire craft is encased in state of the art stealth material. Anyone with a file can put some in a spectrometer and know just what they need to mix to get best results. Iran just jumped to the head of the class as nations go, in knowing what is the best radar absorbent material that can be mass produced. That's more than 50 years of steal material research, obtained in a single maddening episode from hell.
Third thing is sensors and avionics. Iran now has access to the best of the best and its a pretty simple matter of back-engineering to have their own. Especially our sensors are the envy of the world, and our avionics are a very close second.
How anyone can think this isn't a tragedy is beyond me. Someone needs to get fired.