they picked a real calm day to try this I see

Other drones have proven they can land on flight decks in awful weather better than the best human pilots. You can bet that the ship that launches the planes will also be a drone as well in the very near future. Drone war ships are far easier to create than drone airships.

re; Jim Sadler
Probably not. Ships and planes require an enormous amount of constant maintenance.

re; Jay Finke
This is a test program. The competent always start with the easy and work their way up to the difficult.

Quietly confident she will complete her landing test, then succeed in bad weather for the same.
Is the system fully autonomous and how does it assess its approach in the absence of GPS?
Unassisted, will the system be capable of identifying a bad landing condition? e.g. - if another aircraft is about to land, or if the carrier changes orientation.

re; Nairda
No mater how autonomous the drone is it will still respond to its own air traffic control. Without GPS it will still have inertial navigation, terrain matching navigation, and known radio source navigation. Its sensors are more than capable to tell it what direction the carrier is going.

re; Nairda part 2 I forgot to mention that collision avoidance is part of the basic package in autonomously operating vehicles.

Hi Slowburn,
Just wish to make the distinction there between machine vision and reasoning on one side, as opposed to a complete reliance on Traffic control, GPS, and known radio source navigation.
Worst case: Low on fuel on return flight, with damaged comms link to traffic control, and possible damage to fuselage from taking hits, the UCAV will have to make a landing decision.
Will the engineers program the easy option to dump it into the ocean within reach of carrier, or go the extra step to provide the UCAV the tools to asses and attempt an emergency landing.

re; Nairda
The reason they try to recover maned aircraft with that sort of damage/malfunction is because it is believed that it is safer for the crew to try to land than to bail out. A out of communication drone will be ditched.

They have had drone planes for years but I do not see a way to have a drone ship big enough to land a plane on. It is far easier to fly a drone plane than control a ship due to tide, current, winds which would make docking a big ship a nightmare if the wind was blowing. I know I have operated 1050 ft. long barge tows and the wind on empty barges can be a hell of a problem. I just do not see how it could be docked. I do not think I could do it despite having years of experience unless I was on the vessel to see how the wind, tide, current and all other factors affected docking. Now it could maintain a position or probably make it in open sea but not in a River or docking. Now maybe a fifty boat or either something that never has to come into port. However never seen a ship yet that did not need major maintenance that can only be done while docked or on drydock at times. Heck even the Navy with all its fancy GPS, Radars and Chart plotters had a manned ship run aground on a coral reef in the Philippines.