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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
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."
I was thinking more likely http://www.imdb.com/title/tt03...
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....
...in whole or in part, certain restrictions apply, warranty void if exposed to oxygen...
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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.
-- Sometimes you have to turn the lights off in order to see.
Your premise that, "X is too poor an aircraft for modern missions." "X is useful as a drone aircraft with no pilot." makes sense when you consider the risk of losing the most valuable thing, the pilots. Your premise framed another way, "X poses too high a risk for pilot loss in modern missions" and "X with no pilot can continue to provide value at low risk".
Personally, I love the idea of using older platforms as meat shields in the worst case and cheap force augmentations in the best. For missions where the F16 would've been just fine, we can continue to use it without fear of putting pilots in danger.
I just don't see a downside.
Next step is a grounded F35 used as a control center for unmanned F16. That will fix the numerous F35 issues.
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?
Slashdot, the eternal home of F-35 trolling.
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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