Why arent fighter jets remote controlled? they wouldnt need as much cockpit protection making the jets cheaper and they wouldnt be limited by humans. Why cant they be remotely controlled like a UAV for example? If the technology is there why isnt it used.
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You don’t need a pilot for when everything is going right. The pilot is there when it all turns to crap.
Having the pilot on board means A) not needing to worry about lag or disruptions in communications and B) being able to look around and feel what’s going on.
For the former, connections between ground stations and drones aren’t always perfect. Signals can get disrupted, either unintentionally or intentionally. When it’s just a UAV patrolling around secured airspace a 2-10 second drop in signal just means the UAV keeps flying in circles, but in a craft responsible for air superiority a 2 second blip in a dogfight means the signal is probably never coming back.
For the latter, having the ability to turn your head and see another direction is critically important. While you could put enough cameras on a plane to relay a full 360 degree view to a ground station, doing so means needing to maintain extreme high bandwith connections in sub-optimum conditions, versus a conventional drone where you just need enough bandwidth for a few sensor feeds and signal relays. Alternately, you choke down the amount of information the drone controller gets, leaving them at a relative disadvantage against a live pilot.
So it’s not uncommon for a UAV to have the pilot tens of thousands of km away. And the pilot isn’t so much flying it as giving it instructions. On top of that lag of quite a few seconds is not uncommon. Even with the fastest lag free connection it’s still not going to be instantaneous.
Aerial combat can involve split second decisions especially when being fired at. Missiles travel at many times the speed of sound. It’d be entirely possible for a UAV fighter jet to get blown up before the human pilot sitting in a trailer 15,000km away was even aware that it’d been fired at. As good as radar, etc is a lot of things are still detected by pilots using their eyes. That’s going to be harder to do while looking at a small screen.
Remote control only works up to a point, the technology that is needed to go the next step is autonomy. This means killer robots basically and weapons are definitely headed in that direction. I think part of having pilots is there hasn’t been a severe selection pressure yet, (the way machine guns in 1917 were for cavalry,) and pilots have been the apex of the flying services so there is a bit of tradition. Also it is probably better to be a bit conservative when changing up weapon systems, you don’t really know all the ramifications of changes until warfare exposes them.
If there were a compelling reason to make a B-52 into a drone I am sure you could but at this point it the only advantage this would give is lack of risk to aircrew.
As the others have mentioned, lag would have a significant effect on reaction time, and that matters a lot in combat.
Otherwise, “cockpit protection” isn’t *that* expensive when you look at the total cost of a jet. And, “strengthening” the plane so it can maneuver at significantly more than 10g would probably add a lot more cost to it; I mean, the strongest titanium alloys that we know of are already being used.
And ultimately you have to put the people *somewhere*; if they’re not in the planes risking their lives, they’re in the base or on the carrier, risking their lives by making a big fat target where a single missile could take out the pilots of a whole wing.
Given modern weapons, you’re not “more protected” in a tank or on a ship or on a base. Or even in a bunker, really.
haven’t you seen FF10 or whatever when the Rock easily took out Charlize Theron’s super fighter drone with a car? /s
anyways, you said the technology is there, but it really isn’t there (yet). drones current signal/flight capabilities are just not there yet if it should ever come to a drone v human fighter scenario
1 day, if technology gets there (with AI)…true pilot-less drones will easily take out human fighters (think chess computer vs humans…your average computer chess program will easily take out 99.99% of human players without even going up a Celsius and it’ll take a sweating pro-player to take out a computer chess program)
Next Gen fighters (currently in development) are expected to be unmanned or what is called “optionally manned”. Its not until very recently, that the skill and timing needed for precise fighter operations would be available via remote… and frankly, we may not be there yet, but we’ve developed other things, such as loitering weapons, long range missiles and such to compensate.
Also, there is MASSIVE concern about being able to jam signals to UAV
Lastly, for planes carrying nukes, there still is a a major concern about them being flown without a pilot. Anything can happen, at least having a pilot there reduces risk. The new air force bomber B-21 Raider really wanted to be unmanned… but not looks like it may be optionally manned as to carry nukes they want a person there
Pilots aren’t actually that limiting: fuel-loaded wings will bend at around 13 gees.
Ultimately, the ability to improvise, process complex input on the scope, and to simply identify a direction and return home in a jammed environment is indispensable.
That said, the planes and avionics will become increasingly automated and virtually autonomous.
Apart from the multitude of technical problems like lag or more importantly hacking and interference. ANY IT or telecom system can be hacked with enough resources so the enemy could possibly take control of your drone and land it then steal your technology or even worse, turn your drone against yourself which could be very dangerous as your anti air would’n attack at first and by the time the situation clarifies it could be too late. A pilot on the other hand, is a highly trained individual who, in case everything electrical fails, could still pilot the plane back home using just mechanical systems.
Also there are some VERY serious ethical problems with unmanned vehicles. Think about the concept of fully autonomous cars, they are truly impressive but something could go wrong at some point and someone could get killed by said car (this is an extreme example). Ok, now, who is responsible? The person who entrusted the action to the software? The guy who wrote the code? A simple glitch? This is a VERY VERY difficult to answer kind of question and in the real world we usually need an individual to take responsability for any kind of action. Now imagine that apart from having a piece of metal in the sky who has gone rogue like in the previous example… it carries warheads… that’s a really bad situation to be in.
Based on a rudimentary understanding of machine learning, I expect so long as there is a large enough data set from practice sorties an AI pilot should be able to meet or exceed most human pilots in the near future if not already in some secret project. I would expect the U.S. to have an advantage on that front due to budget and flight hours providing the largest data set to train AI but who knows when anybody with a PC can simulate a dogfight.
Assuming some X factor would give pilots an intuitive edge requires assuming that X factor is worth more than >9g maneuverability, weight savings from the cockpit, and the cost to train a meat bag.
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