{"id":964,"date":"2008-06-09T06:30:58","date_gmt":"2008-06-09T05:30:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=964"},"modified":"2008-06-09T06:30:58","modified_gmt":"2008-06-09T05:30:58","slug":"be-afraid-be-very-afraid-of-the-grim-reaper","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=964","title":{"rendered":"Be afraid, be very afraid, of the grim Reaper"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>If I was an al-Qaeda leader, my worst nightmare would be something called the MQ-9 Reaper.<br \/>\nThe U.S. Air Force proposed the MQ-9 system in response to the Department of Defense request for global war on terrorism initiatives. It is larger and more powerful than the MQ-1 Predator and is designed to go after time-sensitive targets with persistence and precision and destroy or disable those targets.<br \/>\nThe &#8220;M&#8221; is the Department of Defense designation for multi-role and &#8220;Q&#8221; means unmanned aircraft system. The &#8220;9&#8221; refers to the series of purpose-built remotely piloted aircraft systems.<br \/>\nYou can read the technical specifications <a href=\"http:\/\/www.af.mil\/factsheets\/factsheet.asp?fsID=6405\">here<\/a>.<br \/>\nThe name chosen for the MQ-9 inevitably reminds me of the Hawker Hurricane IIC flown by my wife&#8217;s father in 1942. At the height of his success, he had an emblem painted on the starboard side of his aircraft. It depicted a scythe in yellow and across it a banner in red carrying the name &#8216;Night Reaper&#8217;<br \/>\nYou can read more information on that particular aircraft <a href=\"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/Hurricane.html#NightHawk\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>If I was an al-Qaeda leader, my worst nightmare would be something called the MQ-9 Reaper. The U.S. Air Force proposed the MQ-9 system in response to the Department of Defense request for global war on terrorism initiatives. It is larger and more powerful than the MQ-1 Predator and is designed to go after time-sensitive [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-964","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=964"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/964\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=964"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=964"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=964"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}