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USAF Cuts Drone Flights As Stress Drives Off Operators
HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reports that the U.S. is being forced to cut back on drone flights as America's drone operators are burning out. The Air Force is losing more drone pilots than they can train. "We're at an inflection point right now," says Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing. Drone missions increased tenfold in the past decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria. The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. Colonel Cluff says many feel "undermanned and overworked," sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed. "Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, 'All right, I've got my war face on, and I'm going to the fight,' and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman," says Cruff. The colonel says the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed. "Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, 'All right, I've got my war face on, and I'm going to the fight,' and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Walmart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home — and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home — all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman," says Cruff. The colonel says the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
maybe they already are.
Soon we will have intelligent drones and just a few people monitoring them all as they go about their missions. Then we can wage "war" 24x7, 365 days a year -forever.
I don't understand why they would do this from US soil. Wouldnt a cross globe latency interfere with response time? They should be running these things out of a base in the Middle East with regular deployments just like everyone else. Sounds like a completely mismanaged operation.
in manning off-shore oil rigs: two weeks on, then two weeks off.
It might not be perfect, but it's better than the current situation.
"I don't know, therefore Aliens" Wafflebox1
These type of exposes are usually followed by policy changes...or request for more funding.
I can imagine the "double taps" where they first attack a target and then hit it again when rescuers move in adds a certain level of stress to the soldiers...
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/outrage-at-cias-deadly-double-tap-drone-attacks-8174771.html
I'm a dreamer, the world is my playpen. But hey, I'm a serious person, I can't dream all the time.
I'm amazed that drone piloting hasn't been outsourced to India already. You don't need to be a Real American Hero (TM) to fly an RC plane via satellite, so it's a waste of taxpayer's money to not get this job done in the cheapest way posible. I mean, it sounds like they've got a drone-piloting sweatshop going, in the USA, but if you want a sweatshop, the USA is not the place for it.
My guess is, many of these aviators don't like the look of this shit on their logbooks (if it even gets logged at all). "Oh yeah, I totally played a video game for 1500 hours". I somehow have a hard time imagining this will land you an airline job after you're out of the airforce.
1. Drone flies around scanning faces of people below.
2. Drone finds wanted target, reports back to HQ with target and expected casualties in blast radius
3. HQ approves missile launch, target dies, goto 1
4. If not approve, drone continues to monitor target until expected casualties are lower
Buried several paragraphs into the link is the real reason for faltering numbers of UAV pilots:
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
This same kind of psychological effect came during the Vietnam war when soldiers would be fighting one day and a few days later, back home in the States. This created great stress on returning vets. The human mind is not made for such rapid context shifts. They don't often occur in nature. Television is doing it more, and more rapidly too. No wonder people are beginning to pull away.
E Proelio Veritas.
The USAF should contract Amazon to just "deliver" the bombs and missiles through Amazon's new drone delivery program ;)
Look for the Army/Navy game to be replaced by the XBox/DS3 game.
It definitely counts as logged flight hours. When this whole thing started all of those pilots were officers, and trust me an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay.
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation. That said I don't know if it is still an issue but I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig. He was making somewhere around $35k a year flying out of a major metropolitan hub. Low wages usually indicates plenty of supply.
I think it's only the pilots of big planes at major carriers that make the giant salaries. I knew a guy flying for one of the turboprop "puddlejumper" affiliates of a major carrier who was making like $19k a year.
It seems kind of ironic to me that pilots who arguably have to do more hands-on aviation in smaller planes (and often flying into smaller airports) get paid less than pilots who fly highly automated planes into major airports, even if the larger planes carry more people.
"Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
Yes, you really should be striving to be Xbox warriors, or at least Playstation warriors. Nintendo sucks, dude.
is an interesting book. http://www.amazon.com/Lords-Se... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v... One of the things the author talks about is how drones have made a permanent state of war politically palatable in democracies. You get all the benefits of war without soldiers coming home in body bags. We see in this article some of those soldiers still pay a price. It is inevitable our scientists will take the man out of the loop and let machines do all our fighting for us.
It's a leadership problem, as shown by this:
I can't believe any other part of the military would push people in combat arms that hard with so little chance of academic breaks or promotion opportunities. Especially promotions. This is part of a general rot in the US Air Force that has been documented in various places, such as strategic forces being considered a loser's job and the antagonism to flying the A-10 warthog to provide close air support for ground units instead of sexy modern aircraft.
There. I said it.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
No pilots for the drones means Obama's JADE HELM 15 invasion of Texas is postponed?
I think it's only the pilots of big planes at major carriers that make the giant salaries. I knew a guy flying for one of the turboprop "puddlejumper" affiliates of a major carrier who was making like $19k a year.
$19k? Recently? I'm pretty sure that's below the poverty line. And $35k isn't much above it. That's not very much for all the responsibility and training required.
Being a pilot is one of those jobs where you have to really love what you do because the pay is too low to be in it just for the money. It's cheaper though that owning and flying your own plane all the time.
"Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
This is perfectly adequate job description for person like me who have no goals, no prospects and no desire. Cleaning up offices or flying drones and killing people I don't care about, it would be all the same. MacDonald's wouldn't even consider me to flip their burgers just for my inherent dislike of people. The military has been requiting from the wrong pool of people, namely social, caring, good, responsible people and citizens.
So these guys are stressed because they have to get up in the morning, shave, shower, get dressed and then go to work and then at the end of the work day they have to turn work off and go back home to a family life?
That sounds vaguely familiar. I think other people have to do that too don't they?
I just realized, the drone streaming video is reality TV for the military and it's a hit!!
Imagine the commercial breaks!!
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
"complaint by some critics that ... pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill"
Less stress killing baddies, and that's a problem?
Too lazy to reset my password.
Have gnu, will travel.
"It's just a game... isn't it?"
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
$19k? Recently? I'm pretty sure that's below the poverty line.
Only if it's the sole income for a three-person household.
Funny thing about my fellow Americans, they have no fucking clue how poor they aren't.
I don't blame anyone for not wanting to be in the US military right now. Anyone joining now has questionable moral character IMO.
Day ain't over yet.
Seriously, though. I wonder why they don't to the drone equivalent of radiologists Nighthawk service. Set up a control base in Australia and run ops there for half the day.
Are the drone squadron commanding officers burning out too? It seems likely that they share the same high stress and poor prospects for promotion as their pilots. You have to wonder then, how far up the chain of command does this problem extend? And therefore, will we have to auotmate not only the pilots, but the next two higher levels of command as well, perhaps up to base commander?
Of course, if we do, the command to take each kill shot will have to be fully automated, since no colonel-level commander will have enough time to call all the shots across multiple squadrons and dozens of drones.
How far up the chain will robots go?
Having been interviewed by Chris Drew before but out of the business before, I'd suggest that you assume he's an excellent author, if your objective is to sell ads. He deliberately, blatantly misstated what I said about 5 years ago.
You really don't know what you're talking about. Please don't talk about things you obviously have no first hand knowledge of. Real war is not Call of Duty.
Bomber WSO.
The aviation industry is kind of a Ponzi scheme. New pilots become instructors as soon as they can for barely minimum wage just so they can rack up flight hours on someone else's dime. Similarly they will have to pay to get multi-engine trained, then will turn around and work for nothing just to rack up enough multi-engine hours at some backwater commuter service as soon as they are able. Soon you see the "opportunity" to fly for a regional and get to rack up hours on a real plane. Making it big at a real airline is the light at the end of the tunnel, but countless others drop out due to overwhelming debt and impoverishment.
It takes thousands and thousands of flight hours to even be considered as a pilot for any airline you have actually heard of, and those hours would cost hundreds or even thousand per hour if you bought them yourself. So you offer up your labor for almost free just to get the flight hours on each successive rung of the ladder.
A lot of this hit the fan about 10 years ago when a crash was partially blamed on the pilot working two jobs, being overtired and overstressed, and then crashing with a load of passengers. People were shocked at an airline pilot would have trouble feeding himself on just one job. I don't think much has changed since then.
You don't kill people for a living. Please stop talking about things you don't understand. War is not Call of Duty.
You are right, they just need a longer commute to be able to de-stress from the day a bit more before getting home to the wife and kiddies..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
24 x 7 x 52
or
24/365
choose one.
What do you think the guys manning the nuclear missiles are going though when they sit in the underground bunker for 24 hours straight waiting for the half functioning phone to ring so they can end the world?
Being in the USAF is a lousy job for a lot of people. Flying drones has got to be one of the worst I can think of. Yea you are a pilot, but you literally fly a desk in a shipping container chained to the apron at some military base in the USA. All the "action" takes place at odd hours compared to your local time because that's when the sun is up where the drone is operating so shifts are ALWAYS at bad times. You'd never get enough sleep.... It's like endless shift work with no end in sight, with hours that start before 3am and don't end until about 5 pm locally.
Maybe the solution is to move these guys and gals to "forward" operating areas which are at least in the same general time zone? At least moving them to a location where the action takes place between noon and midnight would be helpful... People are more comfortable with late mornings and late evening shifts. It's this starting before the sun comes up that really sucks..
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
This should be no problem. They just need to hire more sociopaths and psychopaths. Corporate America is filled with such people, most of whom are middle managers. Other areas to mine are collection agencies, repo agencies, and Audi drivers. A lot of those people would be perfectly content to spend all day killing humans remotely, then going home to the wife and kids. The military just needs to lower their physical standards a bit.
Proverbs 21:19
If you can't raise their rank, raise their salaries. Do that, and you will retain talent.
Here the USAF is going through the same process that tech giants and any other large employer goes through: they don't want to pay their talent. They will bend in every direction possible to find a way of retaining talent without paying them what the job is worth.
Pay them, and they will come.
As the assault began on a bus carrying expats, a guard named Mohamed Lamine Lahmar succeeded in activating a plant-wide alarm, warning the whole site that a terrorist attack was in progress. Lahmar's actions made it possible for some people to hide and for others to shut down essential processes of the site and possibly prevent its destruction from explosives detonation. Lahmar was shot to death by the terrorists immediately afterward. In addition, a Briton was also killed and at least seven others were injured during the initial capture of hostages and assault on the plant.
For a number of hours, the gunmen hunted door-to-door for foreigners, dragging workers from under beds and behind cupboards, beating some who refused to leave, shooting others as they tried to run away
And as a WSO your view was what?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
In all military matters you have to find the group that can hack it.
Few days in the 2nd ACR and they would be crying to go back.
Some field duty on the ground may make them want to get back in the seat to help,
no matter the personal cost.
Just an old soldiers opinion.
The AF has been trying (and succeeding) in sucking the fun out of ACTUALLY flying
for years. Is it any wonder that they are sucking it out of the simulated flying too?
His view in any context of war is much more important than yours.
Leave the discussion, child.
Once you remove the risk, you make it easy to use and you can expect it will be overused. Do you think there would be as many US bombing attack in the region, if it was not for drone ? Lower the risk and you make it far more likely to have the mentality "shoot first check afterward" we saw with the target designation for drones. But if there are risk and cost, then target are designed in a much better and discriminating way.
It's not about how much they have to do day-to-day. It's about how much they can do when things go wrong. If you've got a plane with a few hundred people on board, it's worth spending a lot of money to get someone with a lot of experience, who can save the day when things go south, even if they have nothing to do for the 99.99% of the time that the automated systems are working perfectly.
The pattern I'd expect to see is that pilots work for a puddlejumper airline for a few years (or decades), and then the best of them get promoted to fly the wide-bodies, and trusted with a few hundred lives at a time. Of course, the prospect that this *might* happen later on in one's career will entice lots of young hopefuls to sign up as novice pilots, driving down salaries for the junior grades.
Look for civillian gamers to fil these roles, and if you can, gamers who are sociopaths.
an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay
I mean in the civilian sector. You can't log simulator hours (except maybe the absolute top-tier type 7 ones) into your logbook as full value flight hours, so how would this crap count?
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation.
Which is in no way different to your standard IR, which all airline pilots are required to have anyway. Moreover, first thing they teach you in IR training is "don't trust your sense of motion". If anything, these static control stations are even worse, because they don't teach you to ignore conflicting motion sensations.
I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig
That is quite true. Pilots are paid atrociously, yet the training demands and responsibilities are as high as they've ever been.
Is the option of outsourcing this task to teams in India being considered?
and America used to be the "home of the brave".
got my private & everything.
Even went & got a job as a fuel monkey at the local airport.
Then one day i was talking to one of the cargo pilots who actually had the job i wanted. I found out that he made less money flying the plane than i did fueling it. And then after that conversation he got in & flew off into a thunderstorm... because thats what the route demanded.
Yeah, i dont want to be a pilot anymore.
Are the people in the areas that drones are constantly flying over, monitoring, and bombing.
I'm sure the innocents that have lost a mother, a child or a friend can understand the drone pilots' stress too, though.
Hey I know, how about we go back a few steps and realize that killing, no matter how you do it, is stressful? Why should it matter how you do it? The psychological impact that knowing you have killed someone, especially an innocent(s), probably doesn't differ *that* much. You still have to go to sleep with that thought in your head every night.
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
I don't want anyone to have to endure these kind of stresses, but as the emphasis on the long term affects of war on soldiers, their families, and society as whole increases, hopefully these kinds of strain will come into play in the cost/benefit analysis of conflicts. I'm sure being miss-characterized and demonized doesn't help the retention rate any. I think I'm more anti than pro drone warfare, but I don't think its fair to have these individuals dehumanized the way they are (though, its more fair than how we've dehumanized the people they kill doing their duty admittedly).
The aviation industry is kind of a Ponzi scheme.
Yeah, I took an introductory flight lesson last week, and sort of figured that out when they started explaining how I could easily be an instructor and make my money back! It reminded me of when I got PADI certified.
Personally, I just wanted to do it as a hobby, and be able to buy or rent a small plane and make short trips, because I go out of town almost every weekend, but it turned out that small planes are too slow, and the ranges are too small. And of course I would still have to drive to the nearest airfield, which is an hour away. I might still get my private pilot's license just because it's fun, and for bragging rights, but now that I realize that I won't get any utility out of it whatsoever, I'm less motivated.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Its been doing the Indie cirucit and I hope has general release this year.
The oldest and easiest employment problem there ever was. If your people are leaving, and you can't others to replace them, the answer is simple: You're not paying them enough.
Air force command expected automation to be flying the plane 99 percent of tie time anyway (IE. The dull flights from base to the target), so they only trained one pilot per 10 drones.
The staff also see this coming, so they see it as a dead end career so they quit and retrain.
Now it turns out for various technical, legal, and PR reasons its tricky to make the drones entirely automatic, so there aren't enough staff.
As they did a lot of work
Drone war: every attack in Pakistan visualised
41 men targeted but 1,147 people killed
Warriors they are not.. They are more like executioners..with dirtier hands..
And people giving them orders, from the POV of the population affected by drone strikes.. How are they different from terrorists ?
But my "Nintendo" does actually kill people when I press the fire button!
This is another example of a job perfectly suited to autistic folks. They're really good at a lot of stuff like this.
Well, it's not a simulator for one. You're flying the drone just as much as you would fly a plane. Hell, it's probably harder if you're not getting tactile feedback. Who cares where your ass is sitting?
There have been changes. Standards for pilots of the tiny airlines have been raised a bit, extra restrictions were put on their schedules, and loopholes that allowed reducing pilot pay have been closed.
But most importantly, the big airlines are now held responsible for those tiny regional/commuter airlines they're contracting with. The big guys no longer get to take your money and book you on a tiny turboprop (with their logo on the side) while washing their hands of the poor safety record of those "regional" airlines. Their own big pockets will be the target of any future lawsuits.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
However, the practice has continued:
"A government study recently found 61% of all advertised flights for American, Delta, United and US Airways (now merging with American) were operated by regionals in 2011, up from 40% in 2000." http://www.usatoday.com/story/...
If you're smart, you avoid regional airlines. The accident rates are dramatically higher, and you're saving little, if any, money booking flights on them.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation."
Civil transport outfits don't want military pilots. The training they receive and the attitudes they subsequently bring with them are diametrically opposed to the need for safe, _conservative_ pilots who don't put passengers at risk by attempting landings when everyone else has given up and turned back, etc.
Civil transport has a lot more in common with bus driving than military flying (I'd say that bus driving is probably less boring and more exciting). Military pilots are not a good fit in the modern cockpit and haven't been for a while - airlines noticed the problem a long time ago and for the past 30 years have generally preferred to recruit people who've come through training schools.
Puddlejumper pilots graduate to the larger birds as they go on, or so the theory goes.
The reality is that a lot of pilots barely make enough to pay off their training debts and far more end up finding jobs which don't keep them away from home for days on end than ever end up flying the big birds.
I doubt that anyone would take drone time any more seriously than simulator hours.
True. I had the misfortune of working with fighter pilots.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
I'll enjoy killing you, one day. Slowly and painfully. Maybe you'll even get your own Youtube video out of the deal, so people can be haunted for eternity by your screams.
Outsource it to India.