Word: pilotless
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...though, that most of the flying transmitters would be blown away from the vortex or destroyed by debris. Over the years, researchers have proposed all sorts of zany schemes for getting instruments into a tornado's heart, including blasting at the twister with instrumented rockets and probing it with pilotless planes. One day, no doubt, someone will try building a Dorothy-like instrument--and may even manage to make it work...
...allied troops had built in Saudi Arabia sand berms and replicas of the other Iraqi entrenchments and practiced breaching them until they could virtually do it blindfolded. Among the tactics: Remotely piloted vehicles, or pilotless drone planes, guided soldiers to the most thinly held spots in the Iraqi lines. Line charges, or 100-yd.-long strings of tubing laced with explosives, blasted paths through minefields. Tanks and armored personnel carriers drove through those paths in long, narrow files, observing strict radio silence. Their drivers communicated by hand signals -- even in the dark, when night-vision devices worked perfectly...
...striking ones: about 40 Iraqis tried to surrender to an RPV, turning round and round, waving their arms as the pilotless drone circled above. An Iraqi tank and another armored vehicle bore down on a U.S. Humvee driven by a lone soldier and stuck helplessly in mud. The Iraqi vehicles pulled the Humvee out of the mire; then their crews surrendered to its driver...
...little more than trim the margins. Carlucci scoffs at such sniping. Says he: "My phone is ringing off the hook from people on ((Capitol)) Hill who don't like my killing this weapons system and that weapons system." In fact, though, the systems he has hit -- primarily an Army pilotless plane, the Midgetman single-warhead nuclear missile and an antisatellite system -- are unpopular with either the services, Congress or both...
...Force Base in Florida, once tracked a plane with no one in it for 40 miles until it splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. "There's a load of unguided missiles in the night sky," he says. "We've been lucky thus far that none of these pilotless planes has crashed into a residential area." Garland's pilots have flown 200 interdiction missions during the past year in what he calls "the best flying outside of combat." And not without hazard. A Florida farmer, arguing that Garland's air force prompted nervous smugglers to drop their cargo, sought damages...