“You and Obama agree.”
That is a coincidence. I take the position that I do only because I’m an engineer familiar with the laws of physics, and the limitations/frailty of the human body when it comes to interacting with machines.
“Me, as a former air to air fighter pilot feel strongly that that is a load of bunk. But what do I know?”
How do you think you’d go in a close-in turning fight with a craft that can pull, say, positive or negative 30+ g’s with no ill effect whatsoever to the remote pilot, and would easily turn inside you or out manouvre incoming missiles? If you did manage to shoot it down the pilot had another one on standby in the air that (s)he can instantly jump into and continue the fight? also bear in mind that the craft doesn’t even need to return to base for the pilot to survive, it can be used as a weapon and flown straight into you - the plane itself is a weapon.
I’d be interested to hear your evaluation, as a fighter pilot, of how you would deal with such an adversary. I’m not trying to be argumentative but as an engineer I’m very interested to hear the pilot’s perspective on this.
Aussie Joe, believe in pilot dave. A current F-22 fighter can sweep every UAV out of the sky before it and the remote ground controllers (they’re NOT pilots)even know they are a mort. And the F-22 jock won’t even be pulling 2 Gs. The slaughter stops only when the F-22 runs out of ammo.
There won’t be any 30 G dogfights. You don’t understand how fighter tactics work. You are dreaming or reading too many Popular Science articles if you think a narrow mission drone can operate in anything other than a non-threatening environment. The (limited) success of drones in the Middle East is only happening because we own the sky and the drones face no defenses. The Chinese will not be so cooperative. All those fancy toys, without US air cover, will have less longevity than a clay pidgeon in Sarah Palin’s back yard.
“I’d be interested to hear your evaluation, as a fighter pilot, of how you would deal with such an adversary. I’m not trying to be argumentative but as an engineer I’m very interested to hear the pilot’s perspective on this.”
As a fighter/instructor pilot I’m used to dealing with the engineer personality. A+B= C. But flying in general incorporates ALOT of art. We call it “hands” or “stick”. As in “he’s got good hands” or “he’s a good stick”. In any fighter group in the world, every pilot on base knows who the best pilots are. 10% routinely beat up on the rest. How can that be if they are all flying the same airframes?
But modern air combat isn’t even about flying so much. It’s about situational awareness and being able to predict the future of everything around you for the next 30 sec to a minute or so. It’s a battle between forces to not lose that SA.
Typically in a large scale air battle each side may start out with 12 or more jets 100 miles apart. Each side will probably probe the other with 4 or 8 trying to paint a good picture for their side with the onboard radars. Communicating with your whole team to build your SA. As the advance force gets within longer range missile range and begins firing (or fake firing) each side drags out leaving chaff and using electronic countermeasures. This is called the “exploding cantalope”. As the first wave is running away bravely, their buddies are flowing inbound and painting a radar picture of the airbattle and communicating that to the package. This may repeat itself several times until some element finally loses enough SA to get themselves killed. (BTW- this is why the F-22 is so important, it’s stealth lowers the enemies SA and it’s incredible on board radar raise our guys SA to the point of it being no match)
It’s just not possible for drones, dealing with uplinks and and delays to deal with the immediacy of this kind of air war. Not to mention how easy it is to jam the datalinks. That’s why fighter ops train so hard in groups of 4 operating visually. Comm/data can be jammed.
As far as end game dogfighting it would be a joke. It’s a pure visual/experience/instantaneous/SA fight. How do you think a remotely operated car would fare driving the streets of Taiwan? Would automatic sensors be able to look down range and see a dog headed for your lane? Now ad in the element of altitude and comm jamming and spoofing, in both cases it would be ugly.
Nope, drones won’t be taking over the air combat role anytime soon. Not in our childrens lifetimes for sure.
Sorry this was long.