Look, no pilot
Economist.com
Science & Technology
Nov 11th 2000
The first unmanned combat aircraft is
about to take to the skies. Does this mean curtains for
fighter pilots?
FROM the Red Baron to Top Gun, fighter
pilots have always been regarded as glamorous figures.
But a new aircraft, testing of which is about to begin
at the Dryden Flight Research Center in the Mojave
desert in California, could spell the beginning of the
end for those magnificent men in their flying machines.
The Boeing X-45A, an experimental
plane developed by the company’s Phantom Works
research unit, has all the gizmos you would expect in a
modern combat aircraft. It has a stealthy bat-winged
design, a jet-engine with a yaw-vectoring exhaust
nozzle, two weapons racks capable of accommodating
bombs, air-launched decoys or Joint Direct Attack Munitions
smart weapons, and all the latest avionics, including
synthetic-aperture radar and satellite-communication
equipment. But what makes the X-45A special is what it
lacks. There is no canopy, cockpit nor ejector
seat—because there is no pilot. The X-45A is the first
example of a new kind of aircraft: the unmanned combat
aerial vehicle (UCAV).
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are
not exactly new. They have been used for many years for
surveillance, since they can loiter over dangerous areas
without putting pilots at risk or costing too much
(around $3m apiece) to replace if they are destroyed.
The first surveillance UAVs were developed by America
after the shooting down of Gary Powers’s U-2 spyplane
in 1960, and they have since played big roles in the
Gulf war and in last year’s conflict in Kosovo.
France, Israel and Britain are also keen on UAVs. But so
far, they have never carried weapons.
That is about to change. If they can
be made to work, UCAVs would have a number of advantages
over manned combat aircraft. Because many of the systems
in a manned fighter are there to keep the pilot alive,
doing away with them reduces weight, size (thus making
the aircraft stealthier) and cost. At an expected $11m
or so, a UCAV would cost a third as much as a manned
aircraft such as the forthcoming Joint Strike Fighter.
UCAVs are also expected to be up to 75% cheaper to
operate and maintain than manned aircraft. Since UCAVs
are remotely controlled by operators sitting at computer
workstations, there is no need for pilots to fly
constant training missions to keep their skills
sharpened; they can sit at the same workstations and run
simulations. (America’s air force spends around $2m
training each pilot, and $1 billion a year keeping its
2,000 F-16 pilots in peak flying condition.) And
compared with Tomahawk cruise missiles, which cost $1m
or so a pop, UCAVs also have the benefit of being
reusable.
It is not just the bean-counters who
like the sound of UCAVs. They would have advantages in
combat, too. A single operator could control several
aircraft at once, and operators working in shifts would
enable UCAVs to loiter in a combat area for hours—far
beyond the operating endurance of individual human
pilots—as they wait to strike. And having released its
weapons, a UCAV unlucky enough to be attacked by an
enemy missile would be able to perform evasive maneuvers
so violent that they might injure or kill a human pilot.
Little wonder, then, that a collaboration between
America’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
Boeing and the air force is spending $131m to build and
test the X-45A, which was officially unveiled in late
September.
Chocks away
Although UCAVs could eventually do all
sorts of things, the X-45A is being designed for a
particular test mission: suppression of enemy air defenses,
known in the lingo as SEAD. This involves flying around
above a combat area waiting for an enemy
missile-launcher to switch on its radar and thus reveal
its position. At this point an air-launched missile,
which homes in on the radar transmitter, can be
dispatched to destroy it. Wiping out the enemy’s air defenses
is a first necessary step towards establishing air
superiority. But it is a dangerous job for
pilots—hence the appeal of using UCAVs instead. And
when it comes to designing an unmanned aircraft for a
particular mission, SEAD is regarded as second in
difficulty only to air-to-air dog fighting, and so
provides a good test for UCAV technology.
The X-45A is eight meters (27ft) long,
has a wingspan of ten meters, and stands two meters tall
on its undercarriage. Its body is made of graphite-epoxy
composite materials overlaid on an aluminum frame. The
aircraft has no tail, which reduces its radar profile
and makes it harder to shoot down. The wings, which are
made by the same process as that used to make
surfboards, can be removed, and the whole aircraft can
be packed into a rectangular crate. This makes it easy
to ship X-45As around—12 crates can fit inside a
single C-5 transport aircraft—and allows them to be
stored for several years at a time (since they do not
need to be flown in peacetime for training purposes).
The operator’s workstation for the
X-45A consists of a powerful computer with two
flat-screen monitors, a keyboard and a mouse. One screen
displays a map of the combat area, of the kind seen in
computer war-games, and the other shows data from a
particular aircraft. From simulations, Boeing has worked
out that operators should be able to handle four UCAVs
efficiently from a single workstation.
This month, the X-45A is being moved
to Dryden, where initial software tests will begin. The
first flight is planned for next spring, and the
“graduation mission”—in which a target will be
destroyed on a range—is planned for 2002. Boeing is
also building a second aircraft to test co-ordinated
flying and aircraft-to-aircraft communication.
Flights of fancy
So far, say Boeing officials,
everything is going according to plan. But the X-45A and
its successors face a number of challenges if they are
to enter active service, as planned, in 2010. For a
start, there is the difficulty of controlling swarms of
unmanned aircraft and ensuring they do not crash into
each other, or into manned aircraft. Another problem is
stopping the enemy jamming or intercepting the planes’
control signals. Boeing’s planned approach is to send
operator commands (via a satellite or a relay aircraft
outside the combat zone) to a single aircraft in the
swarm. Intelligent routing software would then enable
all the aircraft in the swarm to operate as a flying
data network, passing data among themselves as
necessary.
Another way to reduce the amount of
data traffic between operator and UCAV is to make the
aircraft more self-reliant. The question of exactly how
autonomous a UCAV should be is a matter of some debate,
but most analysts agree that, although take-off,
navigation and landing can be handled automatically, the
decision to fire weapons should be made by a human, to
reduce the risk of “friendly fire”. That said, while
the first UCAVs will send back radar images and video
footage for analysis by their operators, more and more
target assessment is likely to be done on-board in
future, as the aircraft get more sophisticated.
UCAVs will also have to overcome
opposition from those within the armed forces who have a
vested interest in maintaining the status quo. John
Warden, a management consultant and former fighter pilot
who was the architect of the Gulf war air campaign (and
hence of the current air-superiority orthodoxy), says
the rise of unmanned aircraft will take some getting
used to. But he predicts that 90% of combat aircraft
will be unmanned by 2025. The remaining 10%, he
suggests, will be held in reserve for sensitive missions
that require last-minute decisions by a person on the
spot.
In other words, it seems as though
there will be less call in future for dashing, highly
trained pilots capable of “pulling gees” and flying
by the seats of their pants. Indeed, today’s pilots
might, says Mr. Warden, turn out to have completely the
wrong skills to operate UCAVs. But a generation of
children reared on computer games will probably feel
right at home.
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