Where will all the aircrew go?

[Gingerbread Man]

At the moment UAVs like 'Predator' and 'Global Hawk' (exciting name!) are only used for reconaissance operations, but a time must come when crewless aircraft begin to take on combat missions. Does anyone have any ideas on when this may begin to happen (my moneys on a week on friday), if at all? Do the benefits in efficiency really balance out the cost (which I imagine would be huge)?
I can see it happening in the military in the fairly distant future, but I am not sure that anyone would ever trust a pilotless airliner. I know that almost all the work is done by computers anyway, but there is still that element of mistrust that keeps the pilot in the cockpit, and rightly so. I don't trust my computer as far as I can throw it (5.6 metres - it kept underlining names in red and offering 'no suggestions') and I don't suppose many other people do either.

Any comments welcome, and I apologise for beginning to waffle.

Good evening,
Ginge :D

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"Run, run, as fast as you can, you can't...... oh, you have. Damn.

[WE Branch Fanatic]

We've discussed this before........ I can't remember the title of the thread, but put UAV or UCAV into a search and you should be able to find it.

Think it was "Will a UAV make us redundant?"

[ORAC]

They're already doing it.

The Predator A carries Hellfire missiles, one was used to take out a car load of Al Qaeda in Yemen. They are also now carrying Stinger for self protection.

Predators patrol Iraq carrying a mix of one Hellfire air-to-ground and two Stinger air-to-air missiles. In a recent sort over Iraq a Stinger was fired just before the UAV was destroyed, but the attacking Iraqi MiG-25 was out of range.

The company is proposing equipping the larger Predator B with AIM-9 and AIM-120 (presumably with initial guidance data via data-link). It has 6 weapons pylons.

Then there's the Boeing X-46 and Northrop-Grumman X-47, which are competing for the USN UCAV-N program.

X-47 (http://www.invisible-defenders.org/programs/uavs/x-47_uos.htm) . The X-47 made it's first flight about a week ago.

X-46 (http://www.invisible-defenders.org/programs/uavs/x-46.htm)

[BlueWolf]

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Well, I for one happened to think that my post on a related and relevant thread was a jolly good one, so here it is again...





US laser shoots down artillery shell




Here is the news.

An Official report says that an incident which occured several days ago was not properly reported due to a computer error.

The incident involved the shooting down of an unmanned aerial combat vehicle belonging to the enemy, by an allied unmanned aerial combat vehicle fitted with a new generation laser gun.

The allied craft was reportedly operating in autonomous mode at the time, patrolling a defined sector of enemy airspace, when the incident occured.

It is understood that the enemy craft may have been operating in autonomous random mode.

The allied craft's datalink functioned properly in reporting details of the contact to the allied command data processing centre. A computer at the centre, which was unmanned at the time, scanned the report for permissable detail, and forwarded the information to the allied press headquarters for release.

Unfortunately, due to a programming error, a computer at the allied press headquarters, which was not manned at the time, released the information to the automated news server for immediate release, at a time when everybody was asleep.

It was this fault which resulted in the incorrect reporting of the incident.

Details of the incident were confirmed by an allied satellite-based monitoring system, which also reported to the allied command data processing centre. The centre was reportedly not manned at the time of confirmation.

An officially generated press release has apologised to the public for this reporting fault and for any inconvenience caused.

This has been an automatically generated message. :D

[soddim]

I believe the first time a shift to pilotless military craft was suggested was in the Duncan Sandys Defence white paper around 1956 - that was when the first generation of missiles was entering service. They did not replace us and still have not.

The flexibility of the human being is still vastly superior to the system used to programme computers and, whilst a human operating the computer can improve flexibility, the communication chain is vulnerable.

The only reason UAVs are currently so successful is that so far they have not been deployed against an enemy capable of countering them. Watch this space.

[Gingerbread Man]

I never realised the Predator had destroyed the car, I had assumed that it simply designated the target for something else.
On a different note, the technology to have a car driven for us has existed for quite some time, but has never caught on. Maybe the same will happen in aviation and it will remain nothing more than a useful novelty.
As Mr Soddim says, human beings are a lot more flexible. We can actually think and make decisions, whereas a computer just responds to an input and has a pre-determined output for a given situation.

Ginge :D

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"Run, run, as fast as you can, you can't..... oh you have. Damn."

[WE Branch Fanatic]

See http://www.pprune.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=52740&highlight=UAV