(skip)Posted on 10/27/2025 9:42:18 PM PDT by imardmd1
The "bucket drop", invented by a missionary trying to airdrop gifts to natives in Ecuador, would let warplanes release a swarm of drones and lasso them back.
The warplane of the future is a drone mothership, able to dispatch swarms of small air-launched UAVs for close-up reconnaissance, to act as jammers or decoys, or even to carry out airstrikes. Those drones may be cheap enough to be expendable, but what if you want to recover them?
The Air Force has the answer, using a technique developed by a 1950's jungle pilot and missionary. Researchers are now experimenting with ways to use his deceptively simple idea—dragging a long tether behind a plane—to let a plane pull its drones back in.
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Nate Saint was a missionary to remote villages in Ecuador. He knew that the best way to prove friendly intentions to new groups of Waodani, a notoriously dangerous people, was to offer gifts, but he wanted a better way of delivering them than haphazard parachute drops. So he developed what he called the "bucket drop."
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Then, in the early 2000s, the bucket drop was suddenly rediscovered by Pavel Trivailo and a team of engineers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, who were exploring the mathematics of tethers and devised a number of systems for use in the air and in space. Rather than relying on a pilot's experience and intuition, they derived the equations of motion so the whole process could be automated and carried out by computer.
And that brings us back to today. The Air Force wants pilots to be able to send out a swarm of drones and then retrieve them. It's theoretically possible to use nets, but these are not always reliable and the speed difference means there is a risk of damage to both aircraft. Using a trailing tether of Nate Saint's type allows a fast-moving aircraft to pick up a slow-flying drone. The Air Force's Autonomous Aerial Recovery of Micro Air Vehicles allows a mothership, either manned or unmanned, to pick up small drones. The mothership lets out a tether with a "capture device" or drogue on the end and then flies a circular, loitering pattern. The smaller vehicles approach and dock with the capture device, which will be moving slowly in a smaller circle. The mothership reels them in.
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The implications of this technology go far beyond drone recovery, too. Being able to carry out bucket drops automatically would mean that fixed-wing drones—which are much faster and have a longer range than quadrotors—could make deliveries to your doorstep, or at least your designated drop-off point. The humble bucket drop, which got its start delivering gifts in the remote jungles of Ecuador, may end up making deliveries for Amazon in our own urban jungle.
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The "bucket drop", invented by a missionary trying to airdrop gifts to natives in Ecuador, would let warplanes release a swarm of drones and lasso them back.
Invented by missionaries to drop supplies and gifts to remote tribes...
It’s so nice that we found a way to beat plowshares into swords! The modern creepy world never disappoints!
Nate Saint was a mechanical genius, and a very great man of God.
Ah yes a pylon turn, this is how you circle a target and drop or fire 30 mm or 105mm artillery into them. The AC130 would like to join the chat.
You can pick people up this way too. Drop a harness in a pylon turn they strap in and you bank out to fly straight the line goes taunt they rise vertically a couple hundred feet then whoosh off horizontal and vertical as you reel them in.
Course you could also do this way with a crazy low altitude line snag between two poles and yeet someone to the sky.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Q9zeZXfOp0w&pp=0gcJCR4Bo7VqN5tD
4:50 mark...The balls on that guy made of pure Chad level titanium.
Hmmm ... a concept recently promoted in movies ie the Death Star and TIE-fighters ...
Aviation Ping!...............
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Scripture does command it.
Joel 3:10:
Beat your plowshares into swords And your pruning hooks into spears; Let the weak say, ‘I am strong.’
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