Originally Posted by
Timelord
Easy Street, I think your final thought is close. Someone who knew a lot about the F35 told me that the piloting bit was very easy thanks to the automation. The difficult bit was managing all the information.
That's my understanding too. Looking ahead to advances in on-board computing capacity, artificial intelligence now reliably beats human intelligence in structured scenarios where complete information is available, such as games of chess or go. And I'd say the job of a pilot fits that definition much more closely than that of a WSO. Even the most dynamic piloting activity, air-to-air combat, sees decisions based on known 'pictures' and measurable geometries which a suitably capable set of sensors and computers stands at least a chance of mastering. For all that an air picture can be confusing, it's almost infinitely simpler than the ground picture and to that extent I can see HAL being left to do all the flying while the human concentrates exclusively on the 'military thinking', for want of a better term for it.
It's not the piloting part of the job that will keep a body in our aircraft in the long term: were it not for the fragility, vulnerability and bandwidth limitations of beyond-line-of-sight datalinks we'd probably do the 'military thinking' somewhere else and do away with the crew altogether. That leads to another thought: focussing on improving sensor fusion to ease workload might actually be a distraction from the more achievable goal of improving automatic piloting to ease workload. And I say this as a pilot...