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Air Force Converts F-16 Jets Into Wingman Drones (businessinsider.com)
New submitter Zmobie writes: In a new program, the U.S. Air Force has converted and tested F-16 planes as drones that are able to fly with complex mission parameters. The program is designed to use retiring F-16 jets to act as autonomous "loyal wingman" for manned F-35 jets and fly their own strike missions. Business Insider reports: "The U.S. has used F-16 drones before as realistic targets for the F-35 to blow up in training, but on Monday it announced fully autonomous air-to-air and ground strike capabilities as a new capability thanks to joint research between the service and Lockheed Martin's legendary Skunkworks. [...] But having F-16 drones plan and fly their own missions is only part of a much larger picture. The future of the U.S. Air Force may well depend on advanced platforms like F-35s commanding fleets of unmanned drones which can act as additional ears, eyes, and shooters in the sky during battles." Further reading: TechCrunch, Popular Mechanics, Engadget
F-16s aren't so obsolete because of the airframe or performance so much as avionics and weapons systems.
So 'upgrade' them to drone management, free them from the G-force limits of human pilots in the cockpit, and boom!
If they become part of a hive mind, so much the better!
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
The future of the U.S. Air Force may well depend on advanced platforms like F-35s commanding fleets of unmanned drones which can act as additional ears, eyes, and shooters in the sky during battles."
That works great until there is a jammer. In other words, it works fine against small, overpowered nations against whom there are already a myriad of options.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
So back when the US Postal Service decided to retire the postal jeep in favor of the Grumman LLV, rather than offer them for sale they decided to have them crushed. They played both sides of the argument. When asked why they were being retired they said because they were no longer good for delivery, and when they were asked why they were being crushed instead of sold they said that they didn't want the competition buying and using them. So they were too good to sell, and too bad to leave intact?
This point with the F16 and other airforce aircraft strikes me the same way. "X is too poor an aircraft for modern missions." "X is useful as a drone aircraft with no pilot." Which is it? I mean, we're in an era where asymmetric warfare is the norm. If we were specifically geared-up to fight the Soviet Union throughout eastern Europe then perhaps the weapons systems that we currently have might be getting obsolete against what Russia has in the pipeline, or even against potential adversaries like the Chinese, but we're generally fighting opponents that use consumer-grade drones to drop handgrenades on their opponents, or against opponents that don't even have what we would consider to be proper uniforms or unit structure. It seems a little silly to declare existing technology obsolete when it's meeting the needs.
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...if I recall, one of those autonomous drones got hit by lightning, went haywire and decided it wanted to blow up all sorts of things.
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So the Pentagon finally realized that the F-35 is SO bad it needs an F-16 escort? And what's the logic behind sending a non stealthy aircraft as wingman for a stealthy one?
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Defeats the purpose of a F-35 doesn't it? Let's build a super stealthy aircraft and then have multiple none stealthy aircraft going into battle with it. Basically the F-16s will be saying, "There is an F-35 in the neighborhood, look harder and you will find it.
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Oh they fly, sometimes....
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Flying in the Air Force has been seen as a stepping stone to flying airlines as long as I remember.
Being a military pilot has always been seen by many pilots as a way to accumulate a lot of flight time, which is the #1 requirement to be an airline pilot.
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Good near future sci-fi flick turns out to predict technology a decade later.
Next step is a grounded F35 used as a control center for unmanned F16. That will fix the numerous F35 issues.
They need protection by the aircraft they're supposed to replace?
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
The F-16 is a fantastic plane. Effective, fast, and cheap as hell. Why we don't have swams of the damn things I don't understand. It can match or beat 90% of the things our opponents fly, and for the remaining 10%, we could continue to use the F/A-18, F-15 and the F-22 and F35s that we have on hand.
If we lack pilots for the F-16, making them autonomous sounds great. They are a cheap platform, $20 million or so each. Which is one quarter to one sixth as much as an F-35. At six-to-one costs, flood the damn skies with the things. Even if the enemy shoots some down, overwhelm them in numbers and let the F-35s make easy kills.
Just keep the sharp end aimed over thataway, thanks
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You assume the F-35's can even get airborne.
Not a good assumption.
You do realize there are already over 200 F-35s built, flying normal training missions on a daily basis, don't you?
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Concerning this particular story, I actually called it a while back. It's a logical extension. The F-35 is focused about bringing a revolution not so much due to its physical design, but the level of fault-tolerant integrated information awareness that it brings to the battlefield. Having drone "wingmen" which are cheaper and not as stealthy but carry more sensors and payload to the battlefield is a natural way to augment the F-35's capabilities. At the same time it helps overcome one of the main weaknesses of drones - the ability to jam them (the main reason that humans are still considered important). When EW isn't in play, the "wingmen" can be kept at significant distance from lead craft, reducing the risk of exposing them; on the other hand, in the case of loss of signal, they can close ranks and improve the gain (since each craft, before loss of signal, knew the locations and flight plan / mission at the time of loss of signal).
It's really a natural synergy.
These days, there's nothing about stealth that makes a craft "invulnerable"; stealth craft can be targeted and hit, and the ability to do so keeps improving. But it comes at costs. Radar systems have to be shorter range and/or larger and more powerful (harder to move/conceal and easier to target), and are more sensitive to weather. The locks you get are poor, making it not just harder to get a usable lock, but increasing the effectiveness of countermeasures. Conversely, IRST and LIDAR can offer detection of stealth aircraft at good distance if you know right where to look, or short distances if you don't, but not both at the same time. And there are physical limits (aperture) in this regard, not just sensor / processing limits. And sensors are already highly chilled, so it's not like you can mimic an improved aperture by improving the signal to noise ratio with better cooling. It all comes down to how many photons you're receiving.
Countermeasures will continue to advance, and the vulnerability level will slowly tick up - but a stealth aircraft always starts out with an advantage in that measure. To top it off, F-35, by virtue of its relatively small size, is more innately resistant to advances in anti-stealth technologies than larger systems that have to rely more heavily on shape and materials technology to gain an equivalent level of stealth.
There's a long laundry list of things people are going to want to add to F-35 with time, and I know varying people will always complain about random things from the list that it doesn't have at present. And one by one, they'll trickle in. F-35 is not meant to be an endpoint, but a starting point.
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