Fighter Pilots Face A Dismal Future

http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htmoral/articles/20091102.aspx

by pg • 17 years ago

110 127 17 years ago

strategypage.com

MikeCapone• 17 years ago

Thanks for posting this, very interesting.

More stuff like this on HN please.

Dilpil• 17 years ago

I would really like to see a competition where teams write opposing AIs for UAVs and the UAVs duke it out.

pmorici2• 17 years ago

I reality it would probably be more like how the software for voting machines is developed. In secret by large companies who's only specialty is doing anything they can get the government to cough up money for.

ericd2• 17 years ago

There are actually already some UAV AI competitions that accept student teams, though they're typically not competing in a dogfighting sense, more in a "follow a path, search for an object like x and take a picture of it", etc.

zygy• 17 years ago

That's interesting, would you mind pointing me to an example of such a competition?

mikedouglas2• 17 years ago

For those in the aerospace industry, are we seeing any movement towards unmanned commercial airplanes? Are the impediments mostly technical or social? Any rough timelines?

mynameishere• 17 years ago

I'm pretty sure that commercial aircraft are about 99 percent unmanned at present.

teuobk• 17 years ago

Indeed. As shown by the recent distracted-pilots-flew-past-Minneapolis fiasco, modern planes have become so automated that one of the biggest problems for pilots is fighting boredom:

http://www.startribune.com/local/68083742.html

ojbyrne• 17 years ago

And from reading Philip Greenspun's blog, pilot's salaries are reflecting that reality. It's heading towards a minimum wage job.

randallsquared• 17 years ago

There's probably too little freight to justify development of an unmanned commercial plane. I think the trivial advantages for passenger planes would be outweighed by the misdirected incentives. :)

evgen2• 17 years ago

There are several problems for an unmanned commercial airplane. None of them are insurmountable, but they add up to making it easy to see how this will probably be the last sector that gets automated.

In a combat aircraft the advantages for getting rid of the pilot are numerous: less weight & volume for the pilot and their associated support kit, eliminating the pilot allows for plane geometries that are just not possible with a human onboard, eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly, etc. The pilot is probably the most expensive component of a combat aircraft. Eliminating the pilot opens up new mission profiles (e.g. you don't have to worry too much about the aircraft getting back to base.)

For a commercial aircraft the benefits of going unmanned are not as pronounced and in some cases are non-existent. In addition to the lack of benefits, you introduce additional costs related to liability (you can always blame pilot error for a problem, but if there is no pilot then it is the airlines fault for either not maintaining the system properly or for selecting the system in the first place) and the fact that passengers are not going to trust this system anytime soon.

The impediments are almost completely social, but the benefits are so slight that it does not make much sense to bother aiming for completely unmanned. What you are going to see (and in fact what has been happening for years now) is the increasing automation of cockpit tasks. There will always be a human being "at the controls" for the forseeable future, but what that actually means and how much active control they are exercising is going to be slowly changing.

sown• 17 years ago

What about cost reduction -- less than 1 pilot per plane, there only to monitor situations that require a human?

mikedouglas2• 17 years ago

You can always blame pilot error for a problem, but if there is no pilot then it is the airlines fault for either not maintaining the system properly or for selecting the system in the first place

Great observation. The primary advantage I saw (reduced pilot errors, responsible now for ~3/4 of all aviation accidents) is a liability for the airline and the manufacturer.

joez2• 17 years ago

> eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly

I think this is a common misperception. I believe the operational risk is that manuevers above 6g (varying on pilot and G-suit) reduces blood flow to the brain (by forcing it into the legs) and cause a blackout. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC Blackouts, even for a few seconds, can be devastating in the middle of a dogfight. I believe there is software in modern fighter jets for just when pilots blackout but I can't find it on google right now.

gojomo2• 17 years ago

How about for cargo planes?

signa11• 17 years ago

One way to market this thing, for commercial planes, might be to tout the sheer impossibility of hijack...

spitfire• 17 years ago

Unlikely to be soon.

Radar guided missiles are easily defeated with modern ECM. Despite what the salesmen will tell you, in a real fight you have to get in and knife the f*&kers.

The same happens with remotely piloted vehicles. If you ever go up against even a modestly sophisticated adversary they will show phenomenal pluck and ingenuity. See serbian downing of an F-117 for an example.

Human pilots will be needed for some time to avoid having your toys fall out of the sky or stolen and used against you.

dmix• 17 years ago

I agree, the article talks about the competition investing in UAV's but it fails to mention the average modern military's ability to defend themselves against UAV's.

nostrademons2• 17 years ago

Didn't they say the same thing about swords when guns were invented, about infantry when artillery was invented, and about battleships when aircraft carriers were invented?

It was true back then, too - it was a good 25 years between when aircraft carriers were invented in WW1 and when they sank their first vessel at Coral Sea. But new technology opens up new tactics and new economies of scale that can fundamentally change the rules of battle.

What if you didn't care about having your toys fall out of the sky, for example? Make them so cheap that you can literally blanket the sky with them. Send up thousands of computer-piloted missile-aircraft. If they get shot down, who cares? If they shoot each other down, who cares? If they get stolen by the enemy and used to shoot down your own missile-craft...well, that's what was happening before anyway.

But you could throw up a curtain so dense and so shifting that it's impossible for anything to fly through them. And that's exactly what a potential adversary of the U.S. wants: nullify American air power so the f#&kers on the ground can knife our guys. It doesn't matter if they shoot down 10 of their own missile-craft for every one of ours. If they can put up 100x as many, that still equals no aircraft in the sky for Uncle Sam.

There was a recent wargame that followed a strategy much like this, except that instead of computer-controlled aircraft it used human-controlled small boats launching cruise missiles (that other automated-pilot air weapon):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002

skmurphy• 17 years ago

Already happening. Radar/IR vs. ECM vs. ECCM is an ongoing 'cobra vs. mongoose' co-evolution that won't settle in favor of either offense or defense.

US air superiority is a system that includes AWACS (enabling better situational awareness), GPS (enabling JDAM/SDB for example), tankers, and a constellation of factors other than "mano a mano" with bullets. UAVs are already an integral part of the mix.

jackfoxy4• 17 years ago

The Serbian downing of the F-117 almost certainly had more to do with a spy in NATO relaying flight path info on a moonlit night, making visual contact possible. But as is the case of all black bag operations, the real story will likely stay hidden.

xcombinator2• 17 years ago

Today, no passenger wants the computer to control the plane. They are right.

Today planes can take off and land using only software and radio signals, even when the pilot can't, like no visibility when cloudy.

The problem is that computer understanding of the surroundings is NULL. Today there is no software that could understand(well) that there are birds(or small planes) on the way that are going to be eaten by your engines, and damage it.

The only technologies that work are active, like LIDAR, this is going to change, but first on vehicles with less degrees of freedom. Trains(1FD) before ships(2FD) before cars before planes.

kwantam2• 17 years ago

Today there is no software that could understand(well) that there are birds(or small planes) on the way that are going to be eaten by your engines, and damage it.

This is just fearmongering. Birds, sure, but airplane engines are designed to ingest small birds and for the most part can handle it reasonably well. Small planes still must have a transponder, and TCAS systems will identify and warn of ADS-B signals ("squawk"), even if the smaller plane has not been equipped with a TCAS transceiver.

Dove4• 17 years ago

Entirely social. Commercial jets are already equipped with software that can take off, navigate, fly, and land the jet. Generally more efficiently than a pilot can. The job really is an easy one for software.

Unless something like this happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 . Then there's absolutely no replacement for a human being or three in the cockpit, and the public and the FAA know it. A pilot's salary or two is not too much to pay to protect the lives of several hundred people once in a while, even if it's otherwise unnecessary.

The military believes it, too, and the jets they fly have a higher likelihood of encountering life or death situations such as having pieces shot off and needing to get home. While there may not be pilots in the jets in the next generation, they'll be flying them for a while yet, and commanding them for a long time. The battlefield is too difficult, complex, and important for anything else. Once someone gives the order to drop a bomb, they'll trust software to execute the order efficiently and correctly. But it's going to be a human being giving the order for a long time. Possibly forever.

There are some jobs that won't be done by software until it can pass a Turing test. Software may be able to do the job in the vast majority of cases, and in some societies that may be good enough. Socially speaking, in this society, it isn't.

kiba• 17 years ago

I wonder how would you repell a state with sophisticated robot terminators war machines.

Lawn-motor robots? Perhaps arduino-controlled pistol gun with belt feed bullets?

I am worried about the future ability of a population's to resist a technological tyranny.

rms5• 17 years ago

In the USA at least, the population has been completely unable to resist the state since the Civil War.

philwelch2• 17 years ago

How do you figure that? The Civil War demonstrated nothing of the kind. It only showed that if you split both the populace and the military establishment in two, the side that has more railroads, factories, and soldiers is going to win.

jrockway• 17 years ago

I think any attempt to overthrow the government would have to be an inside job. Then you get to use the government's stuff.

ugh2• 17 years ago

That is not how the real world works.

If you put all the power the state can muster on one pile and that of the population on another, resistance against the state has been impossible – I would guess – for a few centuries (or more). But that is – again – not how it works. There are other players involved. Parts of the state might not be willing to use all that power. Other states (sometimes with vastly more power) will constrain the ability of the state to use all its power. And so on.

The consequence of all this is that revolutions against tyrannies are possible without firing a single shot or using any violence at all. Even though, just looking at the raw power of the two sides, the state could easily crush the population. Just think of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

asciilifeform3• 17 years ago

> I am worried about the future ability of a population's to resist a technological tyranny

No one should consider themselves informed on the subject of robotic tyranny without having read this:

http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/global/the-second-amendm...

"...tell me, how good does a combat robot have to be to kick in your door, spray the house with mace, and hit anything that coughs with a taser until it stops moving and can be encased in spray webbing for later pickup and processing? How goes does a robot have to be to detain anybody who smells like pot? How good does a robot have to be to break up a political demonstration? Not that good. If a robot is good enough to fight wars, its good enough to do political policing. It might not solve crimes, but it can bust heads that protest and capture people who’s position is known and who have been identified as enemies of the state."

alexgartrell• 17 years ago

I feel like my eventual children, or maybe my children's children, will see a world where Americans don't go to was physically (or at least in large numbers). This whole war thing is going to be really weighted against the poorer countries who have to leave real people to die.

I see terrorist tactics (blowing up buildings, schools, etc.) as dominating their efforts.

That said, I think that if I were to do a defense startup now, it'd be towards detecting explosives, guns, etc. in large groups of people. If that technology falls behind, war's about to get a whole lot uglier.

rms5• 17 years ago

I see my children's children living in a world without war.

Articles like this are interesting, but a little sickening in that they assume that continually increasing defense spending is actually a good idea.

I'd work for Swoopo long before I would work for a defense startup.

pmorici2• 17 years ago

"I see my children's children living in a world without war."

Do you honestly believe that? I don't see how it's even possible unless we sedate everyone in some kind of matrix like false utopian state. It's good to dream though.

pbhjpbhj2• 17 years ago

How do you protect your ideology of freedom and [pseudo?] democracy then from those bent on violent oppression. From what I can see a nation of absolute pacifists can be subdued by a single violent person - there has to be some point at which you'd make a physical stand?

I can see the courageous absolutism of Gandhi working well on a small scale inspiring others to rebel against the status quo - but against a nation bent on destruction of your own people, say, what then.

What I find intriguing is that in a situation of combat between computer-piloted UAV it is purely technological advance that gives the advantage. That then is dissociating war from direct violence and making technology the battleground rather than military aggression and effective killing.

Sadly I don't believe, for now, that we can end human warring in favour of "robot wars".

bokonist• 17 years ago

The reason wars between countries are so rare is that the U.S. has military bases in 132 countries. Countries with U.S. military bases do not fight each other. If you dream of world peace, you should be supporting the American Defense Department and Pax Americana.

Dove4• 17 years ago

There will be war for as long as there are debates on the internet: until everyone agrees about everything important enough to fight over.

World peace could arise as the result of some extremely democratic/libertarian/scientific worldwide monoculture that agreed on everything but what they were willing to settle with words. I think that an unlikely end to the story, though. The easiest road to world peace is for someone to win. And that's not a happy ending in my book. I'll take war over that. It's nasty, but nowhere near as bad as tyranny.

Put another way, there will be war as long as there is crime. I hope that's forever. Living in a society that had actually done what it takes to eliminate crime completely would not be worth it to me. I feel the same way about a world without war.

fauigerzigerk• 17 years ago

What's not entirely clear is which countries will be poor and which ones will be rich two generations down the road. What if it's your children's children who are left to die?

It think we do have a chance to end wars once and for all as economies get more interconnected. Traditional geostrategic thinking is obsolete.

staunch• 17 years ago

or Software Developers for UAVs Face An Exciting Future

It's fun to imagine that somewhere sometime a scrawny geek told a chiseled-jaw pilot "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

mahmud• 17 years ago

Not really. 200 software developers can write the code for every piece of flying drone that the U.S. has. While pilots where employed almost 1:1 for each piece of aircraft. Not to mention all the crew, flight controllers and maintenance people; I don't think a drone undergoes the same rigorous safety checks and standards as a manned plane. And as the military depends on more drone, the cheaper they will become.

nir3• 17 years ago

One interesting development is that, with the growing number of UAVs, there aren't enough pilots to fly them all, so new operators are no longer required to have flying experience.

I heard an interview with "Wired for War"'s author who claimed that controls for some of these systems are modeled after X-box/PlayStation controls, both to capitalize on the ergonomics research done by console makers and to make it easier for young recruits who are already used to operating them.

jjwiseman• 17 years ago

"The wars of the future will not be fought on the battlefield or at sea. They will be fought in space, or possibly on top of a very tall mountain. In either case, most of the actual fighting will be done by small robots. And as you go forth today remember always your duty is clear: To build and maintain those robots." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Secret_War_of_Lisa_Simpson)

miked• 17 years ago

It's fun to imagine that somewhere sometime a scrawny geek told a chiseled-jaw pilot "Go away or I will replace you with a very small shell script"

That may have been my late father's fantasy. He was the lead engineer at Boeing Military for much of the B-52's avionics. He was not a man much given to resentments and anger, but he strongly disliked USAF pilots, and it was clear the other engineers did as well. They apparently are quite the prima donnas, and arrogant in the extreme.

This engineers vs. pilots trope goes back to the days of the space program. Tom Wolfe talked about it in _The Right Stuff_.

rdtsc• 17 years ago

I am sure at the end of the 19th century horse drawn carriage makers faced a dismal future as well. Some professions simply die down and become irrelevant.

Interestingly enough this already happened to the Airforce in the late 60s. Airforce was running manned spy satellite missions, but because of the cost and the danger involved, those missions were being canceled in favor of unmanned satellite missions. So this is basically a repeat for Airforce.

davi• 17 years ago

This is the beginning of a long-term trend, from a physically present combat force to an army of remote teleoperators.

radu_floricica• 17 years ago

Nope. Fighter planes are a special case because they're both significantly cheaper and with better performance without a pilot on board. I don't see infantry replaced any time soon.

gaius9• 17 years ago

Writer Lewis Page points out that the Infantry are the only branch of the military who can do something other than blow stuff up from a distance. Demand for that type of operation is only going to increase.

Meanwhile the UK govt is cutting Infantry battalions and investing 10s of billions of GBP in Eurofighter and Nimrod. Because the Taliban's airforce and submarine fleet are obviously the biggest threats we face...

Note also that it's only the USAF who require trained pilots to operate UAVs... Everyone else uses automated landing systems (etc) and regular troops fly them. It's one of the featured jobs in the British Army's recruiting campaign, there's a guy with a handset similar to an Xbox controller scouting ahead of his unit as they patrol.

WilliamLP• 17 years ago

Yes, and after that, we'll have to start teaching ourselves multiplication again, so we can develop a manned plane that can break the stalemate that software will get into:)

pibefision• 17 years ago

Does anyone knows what kind of operating system UAVs have?

gaius9• 17 years ago

VxWorks: http://www.electronicstalk.com/news/wia/wia277.html

Dove4• 17 years ago

Typically. Occasionally you hear about one running Linux.

cesare• 17 years ago

Posted a related link a couple of weeks ago:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=898214

marcofloriano• 17 years ago

"t's not just that most of the those American air force generals began their careers as fighter pilots. No, the reason is more practical. American air superiority has largely been the result of superior pilots. The U.S. didn't always have the best aircraft, but they always had the most talented and resourceful pilots. And that's what gave the U.S. its edge. Will that translate to software piloted fighters? Research to date seems to indicate it will."

I really need some real non-american references to believe in such a thing.

gaius9• 17 years ago

In WW2 German fighters were technologically superior. In Korea Russian MiGs were superior (the Sidewinder missile was developed specifically to combat MiGs that could cruise at an altitude American fighters couldn't reach, swoop down to attack, then return to safe altitude). Even in the Cold War, the MiG-25 could out-run any American fighter.

Whether the quality of American pilots was decisive in any of those conflicts is debatable, but the first part is certainly true. Many observers believe the Eurofighter Typhoon to be the most advanced fighter in the world today.

defen• 17 years ago

Well, he's an American, but there is a 2-part blog post here that details some of the reasons American pilots were better: http://pajamasmedia.com/ejectejecteject/2008/01/01/forty-sec...

If nothing else you'll learn about John Boyd, one hell of a model American.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 17 years ago

"Talented and resourceful"isn't quite right. What the US has generally had, though, was the best trained pilots and feedback. When the kill ratio starts favoring the enemy, the US has typically analyzed the problem and improved training.

I referenced Top Gun and Beyond in an earlier post: if you can find the video, it goes into this.

nir3• 17 years ago

There was an excellent article in Esquire on UAVs, which focused on the daily lives of UAV operators: http://www.esquire.com/features/unmanned-aircraft-1109-2

Pretty amazing stuff. Most missions in Iraq and Afghanistan are flown via satellite from the US, truly remote controlled war. (Submitted it to HN at the time, but it only got 2 points ;))

stanleydrew• 17 years ago

This is a great article from the Atlantic profiling air force pilots and the F-22: http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200903/air-force.

ajb• 17 years ago

Sooner or later someone will make one cheap enough for police forces to buy. We ought to put some thought into whether that is going to be a good thing in the long run.

On the plus side:

  - faster response to 911 calls, since UAVs can avoid traffic, and if cheap enough,

they could be salted about the place in a powered off state.

  - less need for police to risk their lives, and consequently

better policing of gang-ridden areas.

On the minus side:

  - police become (even more) disconnected from the general

public, potentially developing a culture of impunity - spread of surveillance

  - risk of abuse 

  - risk of (black hat) hacking

gills• 17 years ago

As someone who's worked with these systems, we faced quite a bit of this pilot-as-luddite resistance at first. Unfortunately this article doesn't really capture that many pilots are thankful that some flying computer will get blown away by a popup SA-6, rather than them. Nor does it convey that, while batches of UAVs can perform complicated tasks autonomously, they have not yet achieved air dominance.

gaius9• 17 years ago

When I worked in the City we came across a lot of trader-as-luddite resistance to new software too. Many feared being automated out of jobs. Those who got with the programme tho' found they were able to single-handedly managed more complex positions. I think we'll see the same sort of thing here, perhaps a single pilot with the right technology (controlling multiple UAVs?) will be able to carry out a mission that would previously have taken an entire squadron. As the article says, the Pentagon can buy UAVs faster than it can train fully-qualified fighter pilots.

peregrine• 17 years ago

The article states that countries that want to attack the US are excited about this. The article forgets to mention that the US is doing most of the research into this field.

gaius9• 17 years ago

There's no data to support that. Who knows what China or India is working on? Even Iran is in this game.

gloob• 17 years ago

While you are correct that we don't have any actual information to show that in this thread, it would seem plausible (if you compare the amount of money that the U.S. spends on research and the air force vs. e.g. Iran) that America's doing most of the heavy lifting here.

asciilifeform3• 17 years ago

Remote-controlled war planes will probably return to being thought of as a niche/specialist weapon after the first time they are launched against an enemy with some actual engineering know-how. (Consider battery/solar-powered Tesla coils lofted on weather balloons, by the hundreds. Hell, spoofing GPS will probably do the trick.) Any signal can be jammed - especially a critically real-time one.

ugh2• 17 years ago

Given good enough automation, critical real-time signals will become unnecessary.

asciilifeform3• 17 years ago

Barring Strong AI, the ultimate command to fire will remain under human (remote) control.

Navigation also requires a radio signal (unless you can shrink the mechanical inertial guidance system used in submarines to a flyable size; this is not only difficult but would likely raise the cost of the drones to heights extraordinary even by US military standards.)

joeycfan2• 17 years ago

I think the Korean War will turn out to have been the golden age of the fighter pilot.

joeycfan2• 17 years ago

Also there is no way a program would have pulled off that 'land in the hudson river' thing that guy did a while back.

Everyone would have died on a computer plane.

Fighter Pilots Face A Dismal Future

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