Quote:
Originally Posted by Herkdriver
You seem to have a problem with the Officer Corps. and not the actual topic at hand, crewing UAV's.
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Not at all. But I do see a problem with a USAF command that has, frankly, been too relaxed, slow to react to a dynamic situation and now gets defensive over what they percieve as outsiders stepping in on their territory and budget.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Herkdriver
Unlike a video game, flying a UAV requries aviation skills. It's the equivalent of looking through a soda straw while driving a car. The USAF requires all of it's pilots, in all of it's birds.... to be Officers. Maybe they'll change, this policy I don't know.
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Drones are the future. They better adapt quick. Or else the 21st century USAF will find itself out of that job.
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Neat article. Good recruitment propaganda too if they could make a movie based around it..
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Attack of the Drones
Flying bots rule the skies in combat zones around the globe.
Now the battle is on between the joystick jockeys and the fighter jocks.
By Noah Shachtman
...
Private Joel Clark doesn't have any macho dogfight stories. He doesn't have a cool call sign or the swagger of a guy who has pulled 9 gs. In fact, Clark has never held a throttle. He did, however, flunk high school English. And that's how the milky-pale 19-year-old became one of America's newest pilots.
Clark had planned to join the Army as a Blackhawk helicopter mechanic. But that F kept him from graduating on time, forcing him to reapply. The second time around, his recruiter suggested he try instead to be a "96 Uniform" - Army-speak for a UAV operator. Clark had never considered becoming a pilot. But the idea of running a robot spy plane sounded pretty rad. Now he's one of 225 soldiers, reservists, and National Guardsmen training on a lonely airstrip at Fort Huachuca, Arizona, a 125-year-old outpost 10 miles from the Mexican border.
In a sense, Clark has been prepping for the job since he was a kid: He plays videogames. A lot of videogames. Back in the barracks he spends downtime with an Xbox and a PlayStation. When he first slid behind the controls of a Shadow UAV, the point and click operation turned out to work much the same way. "You watch the screen. You tell it to roll left, it rolls left. It's pretty simple," Clark says. But this is real life. "So you have to take it more seriously. If you crash one of these, you have to bleed and (*)(*)(*)(*)" - in other words, take a drug test.
Clark has no intention of nose-diving, however. Crashing a $550,000 Shadow isn't as catastrophic as riding a $4.5 million Predator into the ground (or a $55 million F-15, for that matter). But Clark has gamed away the past 11 months in Arizona, and today, finally, is his last "check ride." After this takeoff, he'll be certified to fly the Shadow 200. He'll spend a few months at Fort Hood, Texas, training with the 4th Infantry Division. Then he'll ship off to what his sergeant calls the Big Sandbox: Iraq.
"Striker 1-5, we have lights. Are we clear to launch?" Clark asks into his headset. The low buzz from the plane's engine shifts into a high-pitched, 105-decibel whine. "Departure approved," the control tower squawks back, barely audible over the din.
"Outstanding," Clark smiles, checking his instrument panel one more time. "Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Launch, launch, launch!" he says, as the plane jumps into the Arizona morning.
The flat gray Shadow gets propelled skyward on a nitrogen-pressurized rail; when Clark is ready to land, a hand-sized antenna dish on the side of the runway will guide the plane to the ground by transmitting coordinates a lot like GPS. Sitting in a Humvee, Clark flies the Hunter by using a mouse to point and click pixelated dials and sliders modeled after the ones in a physical cockpit. Alternatively he can just click a route on a map, or program a destination and let the plane figure it out. Clark doesn't have a throttle, and he can't see out the front of the plane. In fact, there is a camera, but the soldier sitting to Clark's left is working the joystick to take the pictures that make the whole mission worthwhile. Clark is just driving the bus.
During the Cold War, US pilots were nobody's chauffeurs. They were aces, ready to mix it up with more agile Soviet MiGs. Today, few countries have fighters that can match US forces. The days of dogfights are over, unless the United States is planning to start a war with Israel or India. So if UAVs are getting simpler to operate, and if there are no more "duels in the sky," says retired Marine major general Tom Wilkerson - a quintessential fighter jock, a Top Gun graduate with more than 3,000 hours in the front seats of F-4s and F/A-18 Hornets - "maybe you don't need any fighter pilots at all."
Nearly six decades after World War I ace Carl Spaatz became its first chief of staff, the Air Force is still ruled by fighter pilots. They're the guys who can smile through barrel rolls that make lesser men lose their lunch, guys with the kind of toys that go Mach 2.
UAVs have been in that toy chest for decades. The Air Force sent a supersonic drone over China in the 1960s; in the Vietnam War its shark-shaped Lightning Bug flew 3,500 unmanned reconnaissance sorties. More experiments followed through the 1980s and 1990s.
Drones had their successes, but Air Force jocks never accepted them as a part of top gun culture. UAVs were considered so second class, the Air Force had to order pilots into drone duty. After all, airmen earned less money operating a Predator, and too much time as a drone pilot could lead to a loss of flight privileges for manned planes. They weren't much fun to fly, either. At a fraction of the weight of an F-15, they get pummeled by the wind on takeoff and landing; 25 have crashed since 2001. That means questions, accident reports, and a blot on your record. And let's just come out and say it: You're not exactly risking your life for your country flying a mission from behind a desk at Nellis.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.06/drones_pr.html
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