"Optionally Piloted"

[zsolmanz]

Afternoon all.

I was perusing the Wikipedia pages on US military projects, and came across the Fire Scout and Future Vertical Lift programs.
As you'll all know, Fire Scout is an autonomous helicopter used in a surveillance/hunter role.
Future Vertical Lift is an attempt to reduce rotary stock to a more manageable 5 models by 2040. One of its design requirements is for "Optionally Piloted or Autonomous capability".

My question is this:
For how much longer will military pilots remain in high demand?
I suspect (as someone just starting my career) that it won't affect me, but I'd be interested to hear from those of you with more understanding of the pilot's role.

[msbbarratt]

Afternoon all.

I was perusing the Wikipedia pages on US military projects, and came across the Fire Scout and Future Vertical Lift programs.
As you'll all know, Fire Scout is an autonomous helicopter used in a surveillance/hunter role.
Future Vertical Lift is an attempt to reduce rotary stock to a more manageable 5 models by 2040. One of its design requirements is for "Optionally Piloted or Autonomous capability".

My question is this:
For how much longer will military pilots remain in high demand?
I suspect (as someone just starting my career) that it won't affect me, but I'd be interested to hear from those of you with more understanding of the pilot's role.

Dunno.

My limited understanding of the Geneva Convention is that fully automated unsupervised targeting and firing of weapons is banned.

Bad news for anyone actually thinking of developing such a system; there's not likely going to be a financial return on the investment.

So for any kind of combat action where quick reactions is an advantage, e.g. air-to-air engagements, the guy in the cockpit has an advantage over the guy who is thousands of miles away in a control centre at the end of a slow and jam-able datalink.

It doesn't matter how clever the UAV comms link is, a simple high power noise jammer can saturate the RF front end of the comms downlink receiver on the UAV. So the remote operator might well be able to receive a video feed, but he cannot guarantee to be able to command the UAV to actually fire something, if the other side is even semi capable of conducting EW.

So if everyone sticks to the Geneva Convention, or does any kind of EW focused operational analysis, I think pilots will stay in their cockpits.

The use of armed UAVs has to date been for slow paced air-to-ground engagements with no equivitech capability to contend with. Admittedly air-to-ground is about the only kind of airborne action there is these days, which is probably what allows all this talk of Do We Need Pilots to bubble to the top. There's no counter examples to redress the imbalance.

[IcePaq]

Actually what they say is "crew: "0 to 2" or the second number is however many crew the vehicle can house.

The "0" is the clue that it may be remotely piloted at some point.

[KenV]

As you'll all know......The correct plural form of "y'all" is "all y'all". Or was that a contraction of "you will all know?"

As for the future of pilots in the military, I'm very confident that the military will continue to need lots of human pilots.

[zsolmanz]

The correct plural form of "y'all" is "all y'all". Or was that a contraction of "you will all know?"


Speaking as a Brit, "y'all" is abhorrent enough. "All y'all" just takes the biscuit.

Now the technical argument against drones is a strong one, but obviously doesn't extend to automated machines which still have a 'pilot in the seat' (of sorts). Not technically feasible yet, but presumably a matter of time.
So the strongest argument we have against that eventuality is the Geneva convention or any subsequent laws which pertain to machines of death.

I suppose that's reassurance enough from my perspective.
Even where people are working on edge cases (like TrackingPoint rifles), it still requires a human to pick the target and request the shot.