Unmanned Aircraft

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

WASHINGTON - President Obama's top counter-terrorism advisor Monday defended using drones to launch missiles against militants in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia, saying the growing use of armed unmanned aircraft had saved American lives and caused few civilian casualties. The comments by John Brennan, coming shortly before the first anniversary of the U.S. Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden, marks the first time a senior White House official has spoken at length in public about widely reported but officially secret drone operations.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - The drug runners call it " el mosco ," the mosquito, and one recent evening on the southern tip of Texas, a Predator B drone armed with cameras buzzed softly over the beach on South Padre Island and headed inland. "We're going to get some bad guys tonight, I've got a feeling," said Scott Peterson, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection supervisory air interdiction agent. He watched the drone's live video feed in the Predator Ops room at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, about 50 miles away.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas - The drug runners call it " el mosco ," the mosquito, and one recent evening on the southern tip of Texas, a Predator B drone armed with cameras buzzed softly over the beach on South Padre Island and headed inland. "We're going to get some bad guys tonight, I've got a feeling," said Scott Peterson, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection supervisory air interdiction agent. He watched the drone's live video feed in the Predator Ops room at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, about 50 miles away.

Aerospace giant Northrop Grumman Corp. has quietly developed a new spy plane that can listen in on phone conversations, use high-powered radar and shoot live video footage as it flies at 30,000 feet above the Earth. And the spy plane, expected to be unveiled Monday, would operate with or without a pilot sitting in the cockpit. Until now, U.S. military aircraft have been designed to either have a pilot on board or be an unmanned drone. But Northrop's new plane, dubbed the Firebird, can switch from being a traditional aircraft to a drone with just a few modifications.

U.S. Defense officials outlined plans to double production of unmanned aircraft, part of an expanded 2011 budget unveiled Monday that emphasizes the importance of international hot spots and natural disasters as well as large-scale warfare, as provided under a new strategy document. The budget, which will grow 7.1% to $708 billion in 2011, is in step with calls by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in recent years to focus on current U.S. wars, invest in needed technology and jettison expendable or costly equipment programs.

Thomas J. Cassidy Jr., considered the father of the remotely controlled Predator drone that has redefined warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan, retired Monday from the San Diego-area aerospace firm that he helped found and grow. General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. said Cassidy, 77, retired as president of its Aircraft Systems Group, which builds unmanned aircraft, including the Predator -- currently the most widely deployed unmanned aerial vehicle in the U.S. arsenal. The company, which disclosed the retirement after an inquiry from a Times reporter, said Cassidy was unavailable for comment.

A test flight of an experimental aircraft traveling at 20 times the speed of sound ended prematurely Thursday morning when the arrowhead-shaped vehicle failed and stopped sending back real-time data to engineers and scientists who were monitoring the mission. The unmanned aircraft, dubbed Falcon Hypersonic Technology Vehicle 2, was meant to test new technologies that could give the Pentagon the capability to deliver non-nuclear military strikes anywhere on the globe in less than an hour.

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security will soon begin using unmanned aircraft to patrol the U.S.-Mexico border to thwart illegal immigrants and drug smugglers from entering the country, a top official said. Asa Hutchinson, undersecretary for border and transportation security, said the aircraft would allow Border Patrol officers to "better monitor remote border locations in the day or at night."

providence, r.i. -- Textron Inc. said Monday that it would purchase United Industrial Corp. for about $1.1 billion in a deal that company officials said underscored the importance of unmanned aircraft to the U.S. military. The transaction would help Textron expand its aerospace and defense business. United Industrial's AAI Corp. unit, based in Hunt Valley, Md., makes aerospace and defense systems including unmanned aircraft and ground control stations and counter-sniper devices.

It seemed too delicious. Too exciting. Too good to be true. And that's because it was. Tacocopter, a faux Silicon Valley start-up, threw the Internet for a loop these last few days with a website that promised the delivery of tacos via unmanned drone helicopters that accepted orders from a smartphone app. That combination of the excitement of Terminator films with the flavor of the cherished Mexican meal and the efficiency of the...

Looking to take the next step in integrating drones into U.S. airspace, the Federal Aviation Administration has asked for public comments on the agency's selection process for picking unmanned aircraft system test sites. The FAA said Wednesday that the sites will play a key role in providing data so the agency can allow drones to fly in national airspace along with manned airplanes. The agency will accept comments for the next 60 days. Currently, drones are not allowed to fly in the U.S. except with special permission from the FAA. The agency has said that remotely piloted aircraft aren't allowed in national airspace on a wide scale because they don't have an adequate "detect, sense and avoid" technology to prevent midair collisions.

The Federal Aviation Administration has taken the first concrete step toward allowing drones to fly alongside passenger airplanes in the United States. As required by a law signed by President Obama in February, the FAA is moving forward with a plan to integrate unmanned aircraft into the national airspace by 2015. In a notice to be published Friday, the FAA is seeking advice on how to select six places across the country that will be used for testing how to safely fly drones in the same area as traditional planes.

New rules for operating small drones in U.S. airspace have been delayed by the Federal Aviation Administration, which has been weighing for years how to regulate these unmanned aircraft over populated areas. Currently, drones are not allowed to fly in the U.S. except with special permission from the FAA. But as demand increases for using drones in the commercial world, the agency plans to propose new regulations on small remotely piloted aircraft, a move seen as the first step toward opening the nation's skyways to drone aircraft.

After a U.S. airstrike mistakenly killed at least 15 Afghans in 2010, the Army officer investigating the accident was surprised to discover that an American civilian had played a central role: analyzing video feeds from a Predator drone keeping watch from above. The contractor had overseen other analysts at Air Force Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field in Florida as the drone tracked suspected insurgents near a small unit of U.S. soldiers in rugged hills of central Afghanistan.

Armed with a search warrant, Nelson County Sheriff Kelly Janke went looking for six missing cows on the Brossart family farm in the early evening of June 23. Three men brandishing rifles chased him off, he said. Janke knew the gunmen could be anywhere on the 3,000-acre spread in eastern North Dakota. Fearful of an armed standoff, he called in reinforcements from the state Highway Patrol, a regional SWAT team, a bomb squad, ambulances and deputy sheriffs from three other counties.

With its plank-like wings and a leisurely cruising speed of 84 mph, the propeller-driven Predator spy plane looked pokey compared with the fighter jets zooming across the desert sky. But when the Predator made a picture-perfect landing, 600 people encircled it. The crowd appeared eager to hoist the pilot to their shoulders -- except the plane doesn't have a pilot or a cockpit or any windows. The Predator was "piloted" by a computer operator working a joystick in a nearby trailer.

Boeing Co. was awarded a $766.7-million contract Tuesday to develop three unmanned combat aircraft, pitting the company against Northrop Grumman Corp. in a competition to be the first maker of such aircraft. The program ultimately could be worth $12 billion. Boeing's contract to develop three of the X-45C planes through 2010 was awarded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, the U.S. military's research arm. The agency awarded Northrop Grumman a $1.

The chief of the Homeland Security Department's drone aircraft program is facing an ethics investigation for joining the board of directors of the largest industry group promoting the use of unmanned aircraft, officials said Monday. The internal affairs office of U.S. Customs and Border Protection is reviewing whether Tom Faller, director of unmanned aircraft systems operations, violated internal rules when he took an unpaid position as a board member of the Assn. for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International on Aug. 16. Faller oversees eight Predator B surveillance drones that are chiefly used to help search for illegal immigrants and drug smugglers on the northern and southwestern borders.