Tobin Harshaw, Columnist

Drone Lands Itself at Sea, New Era in Warfare

July 10, 2013 at 8:45 PM UTC

Tobin Harshaw is a Bloomberg Opinion senior editor and columnist on national security and military affairs. Previously, he was deputy editor at the op-ed page of the New York Times and the newspaper’s letters editor.

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It's not going to overshadow Chuck Yeager or the Wright Brothers, but when a drone aircraft's tailhook snatched a wire stretched across the deck of the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush near Virginia Tuesday, mankind entered a new era of flight. Not only was Northrop Grumman's X-47B the first unmanned vehicle to land on an aircraft carrier, but it also did so guided exclusively by its built-in computer program.

That's right: no remote pilot, no joystick, no human guidance.