Has the last fighter pilot already been born?

What was that Star Trek episode where the 2 societies blew each other up by computer and people just walked into the orgasmatron to be disassembled into their constituent elements - they did not use real bombs so Kirk came along and wiped out the computers . . .

If all the airplanes are flown by computers - the one guy who comes along 25 years in and blows the enemy up because he avoid stuff and be unpredictable becomes king . . .

There are cycles to everything . . .
 
Forget a handful of fancy pilots in expensive planes we can overwhelm any enemy with tons of R/C junk.:yes:
 
comanchepilot said:
What was that Star Trek episode where the 2 societies blew each other up by computer and people just walked into the orgasmatron to be disassembled into their constituent elements - they did not use real bombs so Kirk came along and wiped out the computers . . .

If all the airplanes are flown by computers - the one guy who comes along 25 years in and blows the enemy up because he avoid stuff and be unpredictable becomes king . . .

There are cycles to everything . . .
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I think it was called A Taste of Armageddon.

Great episode
 
Old Geek said:
With a total estimated cost of $323 billion for the F-35, I hope so.
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I think manned aircraft like the F-35 will be around for some time still. The F/A-18 started flying around the time I was born. First time I ever flew a Hornet was 27 years later, and as a testament to its longevity, it was an early lot B model from that same era. Have also flown the exact jet that Admiral Fox bagged a MIG-21 in during the opening nights of the Gulf War. Budgetary and spending controversy aside, we generally get pretty good use out of our airplanes in a general sense. The legacy F/A-18 will have served for nearly 40 years by the time it is retired from the USN/USMC inventory, so I'd say that the F-35 (a jet that won't enter operational service for another year or two at the earliest) stands a pretty good chance of being around for a long time. Perhaps in another 15-20 years we can honestly make this statement though. I do think the F-35 will probably be one of the last purely manned fighters, though any follow on program is going to take many years to hit the fleet.
 
comanchepilot said:
What was that Star Trek episode where the 2 societies blew each other up by computer and people just walked into the orgasmatron to be disassembled into their constituent elements - they did not use real bombs so Kirk came along and wiped out the computers . . .

If all the airplanes are flown by computers - the one guy who comes along 25 years in and blows the enemy up because he avoid stuff and be unpredictable becomes king . . .

There are cycles to everything . . .
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Except for the fact that UAV's are not computer controlled. They have a pilot. That pilot however, is not required to be sitting in the aircraft. Good luck shooting down an aircraft that can pull 40G's, while you're still limited to what a human can withstand.
 
I think that's cool to have unmanned flights, safer like you said not having to train men, I'm sure in time much more efficient all around. It's sad because its an American past time per say to be a fighter jet pilot and there has been a lot of movies about that and tons of hero's but that's it we are trying to be a more efficient country and world.
 
35 AoA said:
I think manned aircraft like the F-35 will be around for some time still. The F/A-18 started flying around the time I was born. First time I ever flew a Hornet was 27 years later, and as a testament to its longevity, it was an early lot B model from that same era. Have also flown the exact jet that Admiral Fox bagged a MIG-21 in during the opening nights of the Gulf War. Budgetary and spending controversy aside, we generally get pretty good use out of our airplanes in a general sense. The legacy F/A-18 will have served for nearly 40 years by the time it is retired from the USN/USMC inventory, so I'd say that the F-35 (a jet that won't enter operational service for another year or two at the earliest) stands a pretty good chance of being around for a long time. Perhaps in another 15-20 years we can honestly make this statement though. I do think the F-35 will probably be one of the last purely manned fighters, though any follow on program is going to take many years to hit the fleet.
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The plane may remain, but I doubt the pilot will. You can build a cheap disposable pilotless plane that can pull 30gs that will outmaneuver any manned plane and kill both man and machine for fractions of pennies on the dollar. Since both the F-22 and F-35 weapons delivery platforms will out perform the limits of the pilot to stay conscious, I suspect the pilots will be pulled out of the around the next conflict with a technically advanced opponent.
 
Mafoo said:
Except for the fact that UAV's are not computer controlled. They have a pilot. That pilot however, is not required to be sitting in the aircraft. Good luck shooting down an aircraft that can pull 40G's, while you're still limited to what a human can withstand.
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I don't think you'll find unmanned aircraft pulling 40 G's either - The aircraft structure would have to weigh so much that it'd never get off the ground.

Thus, materials science will be an important component to the next big advances in UAV's...
 
Why send a human with limited G-tolerance over enemy territory and risk possible loss or in many cases worse - capture (think Francis Gary Powers) when we can do the same job better with a combat UAV. Imagine a manned fighter trying to stay on the tail of something that can pull 20 Gs all day long. So yeah to answer the OP's question - from a logical standpoint yes I think we have.
 
Well if it worked for Skynet, it can work for us. But remember that humans may be piloting the drones for now, but when they take over....
 
We already fight air wars differently than we did years ago I don't see why it couldn't evolve to not needing fighter pilots. It's not like there are passengers on board who might be nervous about it.
 
Conventional conflict is as dead as disco. Any country with the means to stage a large scale conventional war also has nuclear weapons. Given that, victory becomes impossible if we still want to have a planet to live on.

Instead we will continue to see increased non-conventional warfare that can be dealt with using the current drone capabilities.

Sad as it is to say, the last fighter pilot to see actual air to air conflict may have already retired. We as a nation are just obsessed with the notion that a huge conventional force is required to the point of distraction and financial imprudence.
 
I'd say there are sufficient reasons (from a strictly fighter perspective) to keep a human in the cockpit for the foreseable future. I won't delve into the details, but suffice to say that there are some things that just can't be done well through the soda straw perspective of remotely piloting an aircraft. Modern day air combat is not a point and shoot video game, nor is it a scenario where the guy who can pull the most G's wins. I think technology will at some point progress to the point where it is feasible in a fighter aircraft, but I do not think that we have reached that point now or in the near future.
 
35 AoA said:
I'd say there are sufficient reasons (from a strictly fighter perspective) to keep a human in the cockpit for the foreseable future. I won't delve into the details, but suffice to say that there are some things that just can't be done well through the soda straw perspective of remotely piloting an aircraft. Modern day air combat is not a point and shoot video game, nor is it a scenario where the guy who can pull the most G's wins. I think technology will at some point progress to the point where it is feasible in a fighter aircraft, but I do not think that we have reached that point now or in the near future.
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I think in the near future, we have.

However I hope we never get the chance to prove one of us wrong, as that only happens durring a conflict.

The biggest loss when a plane goes down, is the pilot. You had to find someone skilled enough to fly it, and then spend money/time to train him. Replacing the plane is easy, the man/woman not so much.

Having a senario where you can have 10 UAV's in hover mode 50 miles outside the conflict zone, ready to be piloted in case the one you're controlling gets shot down, is unbelievably powerful. Your enemy gets lucky and shoots down the top pilot, and 4 minutes later they have to deal with the same top pilot in another UAV.

What military in there right mind, would not want that advantage?
 
flyingcheesehead said:
I don't think you'll find unmanned aircraft pulling 40 G's either - The aircraft structure would have to weigh so much that it'd never get off the ground.

Thus, materials science will be an important component to the next big advances in UAV's...
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He set the scenario in the future, so I just assumed by then, we would have made those advancements :)
 
Fighter pilots aren't the only ones being forced out of the cockpit in military aviation. In recent years they've made great advances in unmanned helicopters. Supply missions have been done in Afghanistan with unmanned K-Max helicopters. Last year Sikorsky landed a UH-60 fully autonomous. The Navy has RQ-8s that can land fully autonomous to ships as well. I think over the next 10-15 years manned attack rotorywing platforms will be phased out in favor of unmanned. Transport aircraft will be manned but they'll be systems monitors taking over only if there's a glitch. If an unmanned helicopter can do a resupply through any kind of weather and do a flawless dust landing, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to know our days of real flying are slowly coming to an end.

I wonder what an air shows will look like in 30 yrs. Will the kids be swarming around an X-47 and saying "cool, I can't wait to program this to fly when I get older." Will I be sitting in my lawn chair watching some unmanned form of the Blue Angels? I hope not.
 
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Just thought I'd add this photo of my father from 1963.
 

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35 AoA said:
I'd say there are sufficient reasons (from a strictly fighter perspective) to keep a human in the cockpit for the foreseable future. I won't delve into the details, but suffice to say that there are some things that just can't be done well through the soda straw perspective of remotely piloting an aircraft. Modern day air combat is not a point and shoot video game, nor is it a scenario where the guy who can pull the most G's wins. I think technology will at some point progress to the point where it is feasible in a fighter aircraft, but I do not think that we have reached that point now or in the near future.
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:yeahthat:
I read an article somewhere, maybe popular science or popular mechanics about how the fighter pilot will never really be able to be replaced by a machine. Bombers, maybe, cargo, maybe, attack planes, maybe. But primarily all UAV's are for recon missions which is the easiest to perform. If anyone recalls the article that would be great, it explains it much better than I ever could.
 
Having UAVs do the dirty work also makes sense from a design perspective as well. Think of all the weight and added complexity that goes into making an aircraft for a person to ride in. Oxygen systems, ejections seats, narrower environmental and pressurization constraints, etc, etc ,etc.
 
Mafoo said:
However I hope we never get the chance to prove one of us wrong, as that only happens durring a conflict.
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Would not disagree with you here

Mafoo said:
Having a senario where you can have 10 UAV's in hover mode 50 miles outside the conflict zone, ready to be piloted in case the one you're controlling gets shot down, is unbelievably powerful. Your enemy gets lucky and shoots down the top pilot, and 4 minutes later they have to deal with the same top pilot in another UAV.

What military in there right mind, would not want that advantage?
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My point was that the actual capabilities of present UAV technology are not to the point of being tactically useful in the fighter role. They are fantastic ISR and long-loitering strike assets in an environment of near air supremacy. What they can't do are the blocking and tackling skills needed of a modern fighter pilot. There really is no innocuous way of explaining why this is without getting into stuff that doesn't belong on a public forum, but I will say that the technology required to make it work in a UAV is well beyond anything I have seen. I would never say never, I am just saying not right now. Perhaps I'm a bit biased, but I think most people in this business would agree.
 
It's the human losses in war that decide the outcome not the destruction of some robot automaton no matter how many Gs it can withstand. When e get down to that level, it will be the budget that brings an end to the war, much like why the iron curtain fell.
Wars should be fought by the leaders of the countries involved. They'd be shorter, less violent, and win or lose, the populus would win.
 
silver-eagle said:
and win or lose, the populus would win.
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THat's only true for wars that shouldn't be fought. I am not a militant man, but some wars are for the good of the people.

Every time I drive home, I have to pass this intersection that has stop signs on both the left and right side of the road. Someone spray painted under one sigh the word "hate", and on the other the word "war", so one reads "stop hate", and the other "stop war".

Every time I see those signs, I think to myself. "Pick one, because you can't have a world where you can achieve both".
 
Mafoo said:
I think in the near future, we have.

However I hope we never get the chance to prove one of us wrong, as that only happens durring a conflict.

The biggest loss when a plane goes down, is the pilot. You had to find someone skilled enough to fly it, and then spend money/time to train him. Replacing the plane is easy, the man/woman not so much.

Having a senario where you can have 10 UAV's in hover mode 50 miles outside the conflict zone, ready to be piloted in case the one you're controlling gets shot down, is unbelievably powerful. Your enemy gets lucky and shoots down the top pilot, and 4 minutes later they have to deal with the same top pilot in another UAV.

What military in there right mind, would not want that advantage?
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In our modern times of planes costing hundreds of millions per copy, that is no longer true iMO. Pilots are dime a dozen.
 
Henning said:
In our modern times of planes costing hundreds of millions per copy, that is no longer true iMO. Pilots are dime a dozen.
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It's not the money, it' the time.

If you start a war with 200 planes and 200 pilots, and then need 400 more, I promise you there will be 400 planes sitting there long before you have 400 skilled pilots to fly them.
 
Mafoo said:
It's not the money, it' the time.

If you start a war with 200 planes and 200 pilots, and then need 400 more, I promise you there will be 400 planes sitting there long before you have 400 skilled pilots to fly them.
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We never ran out of skilled pilots in WWII or since. Pilots are dime a dozen, you just have to have the foresight to have your reserves trained in advance and you have to have more people than your enemy to meet the attrition. That is why we need to do it pilotless because in the next conflict that will involve major risk to aircraft will be against the Chinese, and nobody will beat the Chinese on attrition as the Soviets found out in the Sino-Soviet war. The Soviets had 2 generations of weapons technology on the Chinese but could not win against the waves and waves of farmers with pitchforks. Another lesson to learn from the Soviets and everybody else who has ever tried, you can't win against Afghanistan, and there's no bloody reason for us to try. The reality is a $10,000 missile can take down a $10,000,000 aircraft. The real answer is 'flying bomb/gun' type disposable weapons platforms. Say you need a craft for close air support. You put in a mini gun and ammo as well as a load of Napalm, you put a bunch on station on loiter and give a FAC the remote to bring them in, strafe till the ammo is out and then crash the load of Napalm.
 
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Teaching someone to fly a WWII fighter is not the same as a modern one.

Plus, it didn't really matter back then if you sucked at it. You just died and we sent another one up. Today, the time/money to get a skillful person in the air is so time consuming, we don't really want to repeat that process.
 
Mafoo said:
Teaching someone to fly a WWII fighter is not the same as a modern one.

Plus, it didn't really matter back then if you sucked at it. You just died and we sent another one up. Today, the time/money to get a skillful person in the air is so time consuming, we don't really want to repeat that process.
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I believe the difference is that we were losing pilots at a rapid rate in WWII. The absolute need to get more pilots into the fray meant training was abbreviated. Since that time we haven't ever faced that kind of pilot loss. If we had that problem today then anyone with 150 hours in a 172 would be piloting an F16 after a short transition course. It wasn't about indifference to pilot losses, it was about survival.
 
Second what 35AOA said. I hear folks on all the boards talk about how many G's an unmanned fighter can pull. If you knew anything about modern air combat, max G isn't as important as you'd think.

(Oh and whoever said something about the F35 having greater performance than our pilots can handle has obviously been drinking the Lockheed Kool-aid too much. That thing is a flying piece of FOD for a/a.)
 
If robot vehicles were the total answer we would have been out of the Stans long ago.
Air superiority only works when fighting another industrialized nation over control of their industrial centers.

The Russians had absolute air superiority in the stans and they were absolutely ruthless about leveling a village to get even one Talib Warrior.
So, they won, right? Oh wait.
And then we invaded with even newer and more sophisticated weapons.
So we won right?

You cannot win a war against a determined and ruthless indigenous enemy who has the support of the people of that country. You find yourself being shot at by the children of the warriors you killed ten years ago.
We sure as heck didn't learn that lesson in Nam.
And we are not learning it again.
 
Dr. O said:
If robot vehicles were the total answer we would have been out of the Stans long ago.
Air superiority only works when fighting another industrialized nation over control of their industrial centers.

The Russians had absolute air superiority in the stans and they were absolutely ruthless about leveling a village to get even one Talib Warrior.
So, they won, right? Oh wait.
And then we invaded with even newer and more sophisticated weapons.
So we won right?

You cannot win a war against a determined and ruthless indigenous enemy who has the support of the people of that country. You find yourself being shot at by the children of the warriors you killed ten years ago.
We sure as heck didn't learn that lesson in Nam.
And we are not learning it again.
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:thumbsup:
 
I don't think the question is if a UCAV will out dogfight a manned fighter but UCAVs may reduce the reliance on needing manned fighter/attack aircraft in the first place. If you have enough stealth UCAVs you send them in and bypass the need to even dogfight. They can eliminate the other country's manned aircraft while they sit on the ramp. All of that while not putting any lives at risk. Of course small precision attacks have already been proven with drones. It will still be a while before an unmanned aircraft will have the range and load capability to launch a deep strike.
 
Dr. O said:
If robot vehicles were the total answer we would have been out of the Stans long ago.
Air superiority only works when fighting another industrialized nation over control of their industrial centers.

The Russians had absolute air superiority in the stans and they were absolutely ruthless about leveling a village to get even one Talib Warrior.
So, they won, right? Oh wait.
And then we invaded with even newer and more sophisticated weapons.
So we won right?

You cannot win a war against a determined and ruthless indigenous enemy who has the support of the people of that country. You find yourself being shot at by the children of the warriors you killed ten years ago.
We sure as heck didn't learn that lesson in Nam.
And we are not learning it again.
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You can never really win in a Third World uncivilized country. They don't follow the laws of war so it's not like they're going to surrender on their own turf. They sure aren't going to adopt our way of thinking either. All you can hope for when engaged in combat against savages is to kill as many of them without affecting the local population. In Afghanistan we fly where we want, when we want and have inflicted far more losses on them than us. In that sense we won.
 
Velocity173 said:
I don't think the question is if a UCAV will out dogfight a manned fighter but UCAVs may reduce the reliance on needing manned fighter/attack aircraft in the first place. If you have enough stealth UCAVs you send them in and bypass the need to even dogfight. They can eliminate the other country's manned aircraft while they sit on the ramp. All of that while not putting any lives at risk. Of course small precision attacks have already been proven with drones. It will still be a while before an unmanned aircraft will have the range and load capability to launch a deep strike.
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So stealth fixes everything? Do you know anything about stealthy aircraft design and the strengths and weaknesses/trade offs when deciding what type of stealth you want to put on an aircraft? It's not like the Klingon cloaking device, even in the X band. And speaking of which: there are a lot of ways to track and target aircraft. Ever heard of an IRSTS?

I will admit that I hate the thought of unmanned fighters because that's just the way I am. However, I find it difficult to believe that people who've never flown a tactical airplane can "assure me" that the unmanned fighter is the end all be all. Without having been there and done that, you have no credibility or idea of what you are saying. This isn't directed at Velocity173 or anyone in particular but to non tactical aviators in general. I can't count the number of times in the past 12 years of tactical flying that the mission (training and combat) was saved because someone in the flight just had a "gut feeling", picked up a tally out of the corner of their eye or made a split second decision that was correct because they were there in the moment. I've seen our new interfaces for UAVs, they aren't even in the ballpark (hell,not even the state or galaxy for that matter) of the amount of info you need to be able to effectively evaluate a constantly changing tactical situation. Man in the loop is an absolute requirement.
 
Amen Evil....well said. That being said, I wonder when the first tactical pointy nosed UAV will depart controlled flight when attempting to join on the moon (or stars) on goggles. Some things you just can't replicate without being there in the jet itself. Obviously this comparison applies to many more things that just night re-joins, but it is a very administrative and basic example.
 
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