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High Tech Warplanes (The Future of Modern Warplanes)

The most likely solution to the problems of being able to afford modern warplanes is robots. That is, aircraft without any humans on board. Air force commanders have resisted this for the obvious reason that it puts a lot of pilots out of work. Air forces are run by pilots, and being a pilot is considered the premier job in any air force and an essential experience for anyone seeking to achieve high rank.

But the trends in automation and aircraft capability have been pretty obvious for the past several decades. Pilotless aircraft have been used for decades to provide realistic targets for antiaircraft missiles. Cruise missiles, which are nothing more than pilotless bombers, have been in use for over twenty years and have proven themselves in combat. Pilotless reconnaissance aircraft have become increasingly popular.

A pilotless fighter can pull more G's and outmaneuver any fighter with a human on board. Humans tend to black out during high speed turns ("pulling's") when the blood rushes from the head to the feet. Pilotless fighters have no such problems, and also have the advantage of being lighter as a result of not having a pilot and all the equipment a pilot needs. Without a cockpit and pilot, an aircraft can be a third or more lighter and nearly that much smaller.

Many pilots have already noticed that the artificial intelligence in PC-based flight simulators has long been capable of smoking most human pilots (including the pros). And the flight-simulator aircraft are not even taking advantage of the "no human on board" angle.

In 1971 the U.S. Navy even went so far as to test an F-4 fighter (at that time, the best available) against one of its drone aircraft (normally used for target practice). The drone was equipped so that a pilot on the ground could control it. The drone won. Not only did it use its superior maneuverability to avoid two missiles fired from the F-4, but also turned the tables and scored several simulated hits on the F-4. But there never was much enthusiasm for pursuing this line of research, and nothing more came of this rather spectacular demon-
stration.

One factor always raised when discussing further work on fighter drones is the difficulty in getting the human "pilot" for the drone in position to fly the drone. One thing a pilotless aircraft lacks is a pilot's eyeballs and ability to rapidly size up a situation. But there are already sensors available that, if placed on different parts of an aircraft, will see even more than a piloted fighter. It's only a matter of time, probably by the end of the decade, before someone so equips a fighter and tests such an aircraft against piloted planes. While turning pilotless warplanes loose scares a lot of people, we have already been doing it. Cruise missiles do it all the time, although their mission
is a lot simpler than that of a fighter. But it is also possible to program a fighter to either self-destruct or disarm itself and return to base if there's a problem.

Moreover, one can also fly these aircraft under ground control for all or part of a mission, which may be more preferable when using robot fighter-bombers against ground targets.

Many of the problems that have bedeviled the use of robotic fighters have long since been addressed. For example, telling friendly from enemy aircraft was a problem as early as 1941, when British aircraft began using IFF (identification, friend or foe) devices. An IFF is an electronic transmitter and receiver that sends and receives coded signals. The signals tell people on the ground or in the air if the airplane they are transmitting to is friendly. If the right signal does not come back, one can assume that the aircraft out there is either enemy,
or a friendly with a broken IFF device. Despite this latter situation, IFF proved worth the occasional friendly-fire losses. For without the IFF, there would have been more friendly-fire losses as nervous pilots and gunners on the ground blasted aircraft they could not positively identify on sight, or raise on the radio.

In April 1994, everyone was reminded how valuable IFF is when two U.S. F-15 jets shot down two U.S. helicopters over Iraq because the helicopters' IFF gear was not functioning properly. You don't hear about the thousands of incidents where the trigger is not pulled because the IFF gives a timely and correct response, and all of this should remind you that things always get pretty murky in the heat of combat.

Pilotless fighters would still have to contend with IFF, and getting shot
down by friendly aircraft if the IFF breaks down. But it obviously would not be as big a deal if a pilotless fighter were shot down under these, or any other, circumstances. You'd still be out a forty-million-dollar aircraft, but you wouldn't have to have the young life lost nor the grieving family. Politicians like to avoid that sort of thing. In the little wars of the next generation or so, the loss of a pilotless fighter also avoids the embarrassment of a pilot being captured and held for political ransom by the locals. This is another tremendous incen-
tive politicians and voters will approve of.

During the Vietnam War, some 90 percent of the American prisoners of war were from shot-down U.S. aircraft. What will happen to pilots? They will be around for a while longer. There will be resistance to having pilotless passenger aircraft, and there will be a period of several decades during which piloted and pilotless aircraft will coexist.
Sensor technology will hold back pilotless fighters for some time, perhaps a decade or more. Replacing the human eye is not easy, even though research on this has been going on for some decades. While there are already many electronic eyes in use, none yet developed has been as sharp as that used by human pilots.

Electronic eyes open doors and read bar codes. But a pilot's eye has to see far and in some detail. A human pilot learns to recognize a lot of different airborne objects. A bird at one mile may look like an enemy aircraft at many more miles. It hasn't been easy getting an electronic sensor (and its supporting computer) to operate as quickly as a human pilot. The pilotless aircraft will have the advantage of having several eyes looking in all directions at once. For some time there may be humans flying as section leaders, in charge of two or three pilotless fighters. Voice recognition is already in use for fighters, whereby a computer understands several dozen commands. These same commands could be just as easily transmitted to a pilotless aircraft. Just to close this loop, the pilotless aircraft could also respond with synthetic human speech. Each pilotless fighter could be given a different synthetic voice so the human flight leader could quickly tell them apart. In other words, the digital aviator will, increasingly, be literally digital—a robot.