Comment by ipeev
9 days ago
I misread “uncrewed” as “unscrewed” and for a moment this became a much stranger, better aerospace story. Not autonomous aircraft, but aircraft apparently liberated from screws. A future of pilotless aircraft is plausible enough; a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder.
Much of the aircraft is rivets, not screws.
https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/6312/why-are-ai...
"Airplanes are riveted, not screwed because they are the product of engineers, not lawyers."
> a future of screwless aircraft is much weirder
This is actually an important part of what makes a stealth airframe "stealthy", along with other stuff.
Not as weird as one might think, fasteners produce local loads and require holes, so designing without them would be much better. It has been a goal for decades but progress is slow! Maybe uncrewed vehicles can be iterated on more rapidly.