Who else has seen Eye in the Sky? The movie has a familiar starting point. Americans and Brits team up to fight against the international Jihad. But the Brits are portrayed as being paralyzed by bureaucracy, rules, and legal arguments. The American drone pilot and weapons/sensor assistant are paralyzed by their emotions and tenderness for a potential civilian casualty. The latter doesn’t square with my experience of US Air Force personnel. An F-15 weapons system officer said that his main concern, shared by many other officers involved with these fighter jets, was staying in the Air Force long enough to “join the check-of-the-month club”.
I’m wondering if the technology is portrayed accurately. The view from the drone, supposedly roughly 4 miles up at FL200 (20,000′), is crystal clear, as though someone had hung a high-def camera about 50′ above the ground. The people looking at the footage can easily identify individuals by their facial features. Is that practical with our current drone cameras? This YouTube video (fog of war) is more like what I would expect. The Hellfire missile takes about a minute to reach its target. Wikipedia says that it travels at Mach 1.3, which would mean just a few seconds to go 4 miles.
If you’re a fan of Helen Mirren (which I am) you’ll probably like the movie. Alan Rickman‘s final performance delighted my companion.
Unrealistic photographic resolution and missile speed aside, it’s the best movie I have seen this year.
This aired in 2013 and was presumably state-of-the-art prior to that:
https://youtu.be/QGxNyaXfJsA
20,000′ and you can only make out people waving – not faces, but the field of view is insane.
I enjoyed it a lot, not just because I’m also a fan of Helen Mirren. I’m an ex-USAF WSO/EWO, and I have to say when you going 500 knots you don’t really see who you are bombing, it’s a lot more antiseptic from a fighter than what a drone crew or grunt on the ground experience.
I wondered what the huge yellow wings on the drone crew’s flight suits were all about.
And is the area around the drone control vans really a no-hat no-salute area?
Full Motion Video (FMV) quality for a given sensor system varies greatly depending on a numerous variables such as day or night imaging, the video compression bit-rate required to meet the bandwidth allocated to the platform, atmospheric conditions such as haze, and the slant range to the target. There is also a mix of newer HD systems and older non-HD systems used on the various ISR assets. Image quality ranges from superb (probably what you saw in the movie) to almost unusable.
One of the most commonly used munitions – the Hellfire (AGM-114) missile – is subsonic in its terminal phase. Targets will often have a second or so to hear what’s coming their way.
Movies rarely get technology right – when the dramatic needs of the plot are at odds with the capabilities of real world technology, dramatic license wins every time. Movies depict a fantasy world and always have. Maybe half of all movies involve some impossible fantasy element – they take place on another planet or the characters are super heroes or witches or space aliens, ghosts, people with supernatural powers, etc. The other half purport to depict a realistic world but events in the real real world unfold in a much too slow and boring manner to hold the interest of viewers. No one is interested in sitting in a movie theater for 8 hours watching blurry a video feed from a drone.
I watched the latest Mission Impossible movie not too long ago and it’s also not true that spy agencies keep their most important secret data on USB keys that are kept in spinning underwater pools with dramatic lighting. Nor is it possible to cling with your fingertips onto the outside of a jet aircraft traveling at cruising speed. Etc.