Well, after watching The Day After Tomorrow, I was inspired to think of this.
When are we going to see fighter-type UAVs? Right now our UAVs (Predator and Repear) just seem like ultra-light aircraft fitted with a computer and small payload. The UAVs in the movie had jet engines. So why don’t we have fighter-style UAVs? We obviously have the technology for fighters, and we have the technology to make UAVs, why not combine the two together? I can’t imagine it would be much harder to fit a UAV system into a current figher plane (everything on a fighter is fly-by-wire anyway).
There is no problem with having ones with jet engines. Look at the UAV page on wikipedia and you can see existing examples as well as ones in development. Nothing classified. Invention is pushed by need. Right now there is not as much of a need for air to air capability. Development of an effective unmanned fighter would be very expensive. What is more important now is reconnaissance. Long loiter times and a steady platform are more important than speed and manuverability.
One of the big advantages of an unmanned fighter will be its freedom from the limitations imposed by having to carry a pilot. The pilot-support aspects of current fighters add enormously to their cost and weight, but more importantly they limit maneuverability (as a human can handle only about 9g, and only for a limited time).
IOW, to get the full benefit, the unmanned fighter would have to be a new design.
High stealth high manuverability unmanned attack aircraft are in development right now. Look up “UCAV”. Essentially an unmanned F117 equivalent.
Although called the “Stealth Fighter” it (F117) was really a stealth attack aircraft. The USAF is touchy about naming things “attack” and much prefers the sexier term “fighter” even when it doesn’t really fit.
True fighters (air-to-air combat vehicles) will be in the generation after the current UCAV efforts. Aerial manuever combat is a lot more complex than bomb-dropping, and the automation is not yet up to the task.
We also have ROE issues to resolve. Having an autonomous machine launch a missile at a dot on its sensors is going to worry a lot of people in the airline business. And their customers. And their customers’ polititcians.
Adding a man on the ground 1000 miles away to push the button when the machine shows him the dot on *his *screen is not going to change that much.
But ultimately the final call is still up to the pilot, with the exception that now he’s surrounded by other people (probably). UAVs aren’t supposed to be autonomous… that’s just way too much. So wouldn’t it be technically safer to have the pilot on the ground, where he can be supervised by other people, while doing the same thing he would be in the air?
I’m just surprised we don’t have them (fully multi-role UCAVs) out yet, the Predator has been out since the mid-90s.
Has no one learned the lessons of Skynet??? First they beat us in chess, then they vacuum up our rooms, next they’ll be using us for batteries to power their artificial realities!
LockMart is working on this one. The geek in me really hopes they build it.
Summary of the link: UAV that launches from a sub, breaks the surface, and uses its jets to reach the target. Then flies back into the water to be retrieved below the surface by its mothership. For some reason, I think this is really cool.
But what’s the point of a fighter? To kill enemy attack planes and bombers, and to do that you first have to defeat the enemy fighters.
Except there are no enemy fighters nowadays, and no enemy attack planes or bombers.
So given that what’s the purpose of the fighter? And what’s the difference between an unmanned fighter that can fly to the battlefield and fire missiles at enemy aircraft, and a missile that can fly to the battlefield and fire itself at enemy aircraft?
What would a fighter UAV be fighting? Most of our enemies have very little in the way of air forces, which quickly goes to nothing, in about the first two days of a war.
Why no fighter UAVs? Either we have to make them autonomous and very, very intelligent, which won’t be possible for a long time; or we have humans fly them from remote locations.
If you have them piloted remotely, then one has to figure that they cannot be piloted from long range, because the lag from bouncing a signal up to a satellite and down to the vehicle is simply too great to make split-second maneuvers.
Ok, so what about having a line of sight connection between the pilot and the aircraft? Suddenly the range of the aircraft is limited by terrain and the horizon. Also, if this fighter is going to be going out to kill enemy fighters, it would have to be able to operate in an environment where there’s a lot of electronic warfare going on – jamming, spoofing, etc.
Really not an easy thing to do at all, magnitudes harder than flying Predators and Reapers as we do now in totally benign environments.
Is your basic RC plane sophisticated enough to ram a predator? Certainly it would take out the little photo planes I saw pictures of in the first Gulf War, and the Israelis were flying at some point if they were low enough.
What makes you think the US is the only ones with UAVs?
You can’t predict what will happen in the future. What is certain is that you can’t make moderns fighters out of nothing in a short ammount of time if something happens with a country that does have an Air Force such as Russia, China or North Korea.
I can predict that a conflict with Russia or China will rise to nuclear threats before a shot is fired. And that air to air dogfights won’t happen in the future. Missiles from miles away will decide who has superiority where. Maneuverability will be useful for knocking out ground targets, not other planes.
It’s the electronic warfare part that worries me. If I were going up against an enemy with UAVs, I’d invest a significant amount of my defense budget in developing jamming technology. Or, for that matter, satellite interception technology - especially if a handful of missiles could ground half my enemy’s air force.
That’s a problem with weapons development: designers try to develop weapons that’ll defeat the technology the enemy has, not the technology the enemy will develop in respose.
Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but the impression I get from reading about UAV’s flown in Afghanistan is that they are in fact remotedly pilotted from the States, most likely thru satelite link, which like you, makes me wonder about the time delay.
