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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.
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
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.
What sort of mission do these drones fly where even a 2000msec latency would matter?
What sort of mission do these drones fly where even a 2000msec latency would matter?
Seems like 2 seconds would be a significant delay if you're firing guns or shooting missiles. I'm guessing that computers probably help to compensate for the difference as long as you tagged your targets in advance.
Taking guns away from the 99% gives the 1% 100% of the power.
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.
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.
so I have a sneaking suspicion the military has also worked this one out.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
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.
Seems like 2 seconds would be a significant delay if you're firing guns or shooting missiles.
The drones don't have guns. The missles/bombs are GPS guided. You set the coordinates to those of the target. The latency doesn't matter much.
It is far less expensive to station a serviceman in Nevada than in Khandahar.
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.
No pilots for the drones means Obama's JADE HELM 15 invasion of Texas is postponed?
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.
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.
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.