First All-Drone USAF Air Wing

bfwebster writes "Strategy Page reports that the United States Air Force has announced its first air wing that will consist entirely of unmanned craft. The 174th Fighter Wing has flown its last manned combat sorties; its F-16s will be entirely replaced by MQ-9 Reapers. Reasons cited include costs (maintenance and fuel) and the drone's ability to stay in the air up to 14 hours, waiting for a target to show itself."

Comments

Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[BWJones]

This has been in the works for a while now, but I should mention that this is not the first all-drone USAF wing. The 432nd is. Last year when I visited Creech AFB and the 432nd wing, I was briefed on the Air Force's plans to start transitioning a number of wings to unmanned wings and the ANG wing from Syracuse was the first one on the list. Interestingly, it will not be the last either as the UAV mission has become the Air Forces single most requested asset. Additional ANG wings in California, Arizona, North Dakota, Alabama, Texas and Nevada are next. Look for additional changes at March AFB and Minot AFB.

Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[mcrbids]

Afraid I can't be too specific about what division, etc. but Beale AFB in Northern California has a "permanent temporary flight restriction" over it. Since it's just south of me, and on the way to just about anything interesting, I run into it all the time when I fly privately. (I'm a private pilot)

It's not a big deal, really - in order to fly above the AFB's airspace, I have to be in touch with regional (NorCal) Approach Control and have to submit to their direction. (Why else would I be in touch with ATC?!?) But at least 1-2 days/week this "temporary" flight restriction is in effect, so they're flying UAV's all the time.

The biggest problem with ATC is that it's completely segregated. Since it mostly works, it's not often criticized, but it does put a significant amount of load on the pilot. For an hour-long flight, it's not atypical for me to fly for 20-30 minutes before I get a flight plan opened and in positive contact with ATC, what with all the frequency change requests, briefings, waiting in line, and other handshaking chatter I have to do! God forbid I should crash in the first half of the flight!

Another example, if I'm flying 3,000 feet over X airport, I'd think it would be a good idea for pilots at X airport to know. But unless I actually announce on the appropriate frequency, there's no way for them to know. And there's no easy way for me to know if I'm near an airport unless I'm using a GPS. And, cruising at 140 MPH means I'm only going to be over the airport and associated traffic for anywhere from 1-2 minutes. And the next airport is 20 miles away, 1/7 of an hour away, another 8 minutes or so. Remember when I said it took 20 minutes to get a flight plan opened? Further, it's perfectly legal for me to fly just 2,000 feet over the vast majority of smaller airports without announcing anything at all, even though it's common for traffic to fly in to airports a few thousand feet high if they aren't familiar and sort of "drop in" after announcing.
effort to do things that should be 100% computerized. If aviation radios had the equivalent of TCP and self-announced their position a la GPS, it could be a real-time, fully-coordinated, highly secure and all-but-automatic system that required almost no actual human intervention on the radio for most tasks.

Note: I wouldn't use TCP - it sucks ass when the packet loss gets any higher than a few percent - but there are a number of protocols that have been developed for such a purpose. For example, many game developers use UDP and then code lots of logic into the application, which extends UDP into a quasi-protocol.

The technology really wouldn't be all that hard. Just break down the Earth into groups of coordinates, perhaps 30 seconds or so on a side. Then, a GPS unit would "announce" it's position into an IRC group of the coordinate block that applied. Depending on the speed of the aircraft, it would also "subscribe" to the coordinate blocks that are deemed appropriate - the faster the plane, the larger the radius of coordinate groups it would request updates from.

Running a radio-based packet-switching network is pretty well understood - HAMs have been doing it for a long, long time, along with cell phone providers, Wifi, WiMax, UWB, and gobs of other technologies, any of which would probably be quite sufficient for the task. There is a *lot* of radio space available for aviation, since aviation radio is one of the older technologies around, and simple packet-switching technologies allow many radios to share a common communications channel.

Think IRC, with SSL enabled as appropriate. (granting an FAA-granted 4096-bit certificate would make it damned hard to spoof a radio call!) I could write the software in a few months. I could program the GPS unit with a GPU and a bare-bones Linux core in perhaps 6 months. But it would take me 10 years (at best) to get this rammed through the Gubbmint if I had nearly unlimited funds and some damned good lobbyists on my speed-dial. Augh.

But, I digress. What was I talking about, again?

Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[Alioth]

What bothers me about this is that you take away risk to persons from war, and those persons are more willing to wage war...which leads to more war.

Probably the only thing that has saved us since WWII is the fact that the leadership realised that they were personally no longer safe in the context of nuclear weapons - so to save their own skins, they strenously avoided world war 3.

If we can wage war at no risk to ourselves, then war will become a more viable option - which is a bad development.

Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[jcr]

If aviation radios had the equivalent of TCP and self-announced their position a la GPS, it could be a real-time, fully-coordinated, highly secure and all-but-automatic system that required almost no actual human intervention on the radio for most tasks.

There are so many things about aviation that could be vastly improved by applying modern technology. Ever had a look at an ATC radar display? Best 1950s technology you can imagine when it comes to user interface.

I can just imagine the reduction in ATC personnel burn-out, if you just made the display show icons of the aircraft, in a couple of sizes to indicate the general type (heavy transport, private jet, helicopter, etc.), color coded for altitude, flashing in red if the computer thinks they're too close together...

But it would take me 10 years (at best) to get this rammed through the Gubbmint if I had nearly unlimited funds and some damned good lobbyists on my speed-dial. Augh.

When I was kicking around these kinds of ideas many years ago, it seemed to me that the best bet would be to sell a better, cheaper, more modern ATC system to a country that needed to be a bit more budget-conscious than the USA.

-jcr

Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[Ihlosi]

You should know that the pilots of these craft are actually subject to a lot more stress from the job, because they actually watch the missiles fired from the point of launch to the impact and they are forced to see exactly what they're doing to the people they're attacking.

Well, in that case, they should make "being a zero-empathy sociopath" part of the necessary qualifications for becoming a drone operator. That way, the extra stress doesn't appear, and the kill rate might actually go up a bit.

Heck, anyone who has to see what dropping a couple of hundred pounds of explosives on a bunch of people will do in order to be somewhat distressed by doing that almost qualifies already.

Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[Oswald]

There's not nearly as much low-hanging fruit available as you (and Boeing, who "back-burnered" this project after several years of shouting it from the mountaintops back in the first half of the decade) seem to think. Every single suggestion you made would be somewhere between useless and obstructive. It's not easy to think of ways to (further) fine tune systems that have been in use by thousands of people for decades. The FAA has been trying to improve the systems that controllers work with for years, and at least half of the "improvements" end up being half-assed. Worse, they keep kidding themselves that they've made our jobs easier, so they can allow staffing to erode.

That's not to say the system can't be improved. It IS to say that the problem is very difficult. NATCA has said for years that the quickest and cheapest increases in capacity would come from adding runways. The fifth runway at ATL has more than borne out that position, taking airborne delays from a bi-hourly occurrence to something that is rarely seen in good weather.

Re:Not the first UAV wing.... or the last.

[mcrbids]

There are a number of problems with a transponder.

1) There's no identity attached to a transponder, except for a 4 digit code you can set yourself. (is that plane 5 miles directly behind you a little 90 MPH Cessna 150 or 250 MPH Turbine?)

2) They only are useful to ATC. If you're not flying under ATC control, (perfectly legal!) or haven't contacted ATC yet for whatever reason, (such as opening a friggen flight plan) you don't know about the Turbine 5 miles directly behind you closing in at 150 MPH.

3) They use a standard pressure altimeter, which aren't exactly accurate. It's pretty normal for your altimeter to be 250 or more feet off vertically, when you get an update from a nearby AWOS or something. Meaning, the 500' of vertical separation between VFR/IFR traffic can be effectively ZERO.

4) They can be turned off easily.

Re:Fighter ??

[drik00]

The problem is that very few of the talented pilots want to do this stuff. I have quite a few friends that are either instructors or students in the USAF. Two I was talking with the other day said that if they were forced to do UAV flying, they'd have to find some way out of flying all together. For most of them, they signed up to be fighter pilots, so even flying a bomber would be a let down.

They're competitive as hell by nature... I'm interested to see how this turns out for the USAF considering the antipathy I've seen towards piloting these things.

J

Re:Fighter ??

[The_Hun]

I wonder if there were any sentiments against long range missiles (where you don't even see the enemy).

Re:Fighter ??

[HuguesT]

That's potentially. Right now drones are itty bitty things with props, meant for long times in the air essentially for surveillance.

Dogfighting requires situation awareness that is very difficult to achieve in a drone. One big problem is image throughput and controller display. It's not an unsolvable problem but it would cost a lot right now.

On the other hand, dogfighting is a rare occurrence in modern wars. I don't think there were even one instance in Iraq. I think the F-14 did dogfighting in anger exactly twice in its entire career with the US Navy (a lot more in the Iran-Iraq war in the 80s, of course).

Re:Fighter ??

[Caboosian]

I'm willing to bet that if you gathered some Falcon 4 gamers, they'd all do any training etc. required to pilot one of these bad boys. This, however, makes Ender's game spring to mind. In all seriousness, I wonder if gamers could make an ideal target for UAV pilots? Would said gamer have to become a fighter pilot to have the skills/knowledge to pilot said UAV, or could they be flying them while skipping the more intensive pilot stuff?

Re:Fighter ??

[couchslug]

"I was talking with the other day said that if they were forced to do UAV flying, they'd have to find some way out of flying all together. For most of them, they signed up to be fighter pilots, so even flying a bomber would be a let down."

That's why the Army needs to take over the drone program. The AF has shed a stunning number of missions and aircraft (it didn't originally want the A-10) and wants to only do air dominance.

Fine, take away all other missions and give them to the folks who need them most. Have Army and USMC UAV operators do rotations on the ground as forward controllers, and they will surely be motivated to fly UAVs effectively.

Re:A sad, sad day

[Phrogman]

Until the US devises and deploys the first UGS (Unmanned Guilded Soldier) robots on the ground. Then going to war essentially means the US sets up a secure base on the ground and a bunch of highschool grads play video games until they run out of "lives" (err, UGS units) or the enemy all dies and they beat the level, err win the war

On a side note: why don't comments support the html DEL tag?