Aircraft carrier flight decks are busy places with no margin for mistakes, so to make sure a new drone designed to refuel aircraft in flight won’t get in the way, the Navy’s been running tests on USS George H.W. Bush while it’s been operating in the Atlantic.
The 50-foot-long MQ-25 drone, which can fly 500 nautical miles carrying a load of 16,000 pounds of fuel, will be the world’s first operational, carrier-based unmanned aircraft.