Another video talking about the Aero Shark Electronics Warfare and Surveillance aircraft.
The development of this kind of platform extends far past war, from an abstracted perspective of a mechanized military as a series of different sized sensor platforms in differing number and vulnerability, there is a gap in sensor platforms precisely the size of an Aero Shark ultralight aircraft.
https://theaviationist.com/2024/05/09/ultra-surveillance-dro
I sure hope we have been sharing these with Ukraine and we just didn’t hear about it because it was part of a classified program
That gap is even larger for search and rescue, large high resolution surveys with high fidelity scientific instruments, wildfire monitoring and disaster response in general.
The military industrial complex of the west NEEDS the future to be F35s and incredibly expensive missile systems requiring parades full of defense contractors to even construct a single one, but it is precisely for that reason that this vision of peace and the future will never be for you or me.
The Aero Shark? Yeah I can totally see a future manned/unmanned version of these finding a person overboard from a ship simply because it was able to loiter for so long while being able to cover large distances safely at relatively low altitude. I can totally see these becoming the aircraft you see above natural disasters zones all over the world as a symbol to people in desperate situations that people can see the state they are in and are coming to help.
I can see a future where Ukraine leads the world in innovating at the leading edge of disaster response and lifesaving technology, where “Ukraine” becomes synonymous with “Advanced Emergency Response” like “German” is with “Precision Engineering”.
Does this say “Don’t worry you are going to be ok!” to you?
To simply say “No” is an understatement of tragic size, but even an unmanned military grey version of the Shark does. It look like something designed with joy being repurposed to save lives and bring peace, which means it is part of the most fearsome category of weapons.
The U.S. military tried to temporarily? privatize their ISR with a measly 6 business jets aircraft for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) that were supposed to replace a huge fleet of turboprop aicraft they already got rid of and honestly I can’t think of a more fitting metaphor for how my country has lost its way…
I hope some of those “obsolete” dual turboprop ISR aircraft made it to Ukraine through some clandestine network of defense aid packages… I am guessing the US military primarily gave them to police departments and ICE type agencies however.