US drone lands on carrier deck in historic flight
A bat-winged drone touched down smoothly on the deck of a US aircraft carrier on Wednesday, marking a historic milestone for robotic flight. The US Navy's X-47B floated down toward the carrier USS George H.W. Bush at reduced speed and then caught an arresting wire on its tail hook, bringing it to a stop in a textbook landing, as reporters and top brass watched. "You saw the future today," Navy Secretary Ray Mabus told journalists afterward. The experimental plane had taken off about an hour earlier from the Patuxent River naval air station in Maryland before arriving at the carrier about 80 miles off the Virginia coast at about 1:40 pm local time (1740 GMT). Naval pilots require years of training to learn how to land a fighter jet on a carrier floating at sea, one of the most daunting tasks in aviation. But Wednesday's unprecedented landing by an unmanned plane showed that sophisticated computer software could perform the same task, guiding a robotic aircraft safely onto the deck of a ship at sea.
