All involved should have know this was coming, and I find it hard to believe they didn’t...
Just wait till robots are doing everything for us. Then you will see REAL unemployment.
this is excellent and welcome news.
part of the solution is to award the malcontents
with a bad paper discharge.
they all knew this was coming.
>> The air force is also considering changing the term UAV (unmanned aerial vehicles) to RPV (remotely piloted vehicles),
Oh sure, that’ll do the trick.
Gulf War I: I can remember Hackworth, I think, pointing out how the Marine pilots slept in foxholes near their aircraft and maybe even pulled guard duty occasionally. USAF pilots were billeted in suitable hotels and ferried back and to in air-conditioned buses. Hackworth railed against “Perfumed Princes”, in his day.
World Government needs no pilots.
Just wait for UAV airliners.
The government will license and tax robots.
I wish I could fly an unmanned aircraft.
But i am not going to get sad about it.
Not when there is, cake...
IMHO. The male spirit is being crushed by technology. Why is it that so many young men are feral? Because they have no purpose in life, they know they are simply not needed (a lack of a father in their lives simply reenforces this). They have no outlet for their testosterone, except mindless risk taking, gangs and impregnating as many girls as possible.
It may be deeper in the story, pardon me for not clicking and checking first, but...
In the Army we have junior enlisted "flying" UAVs, not officers like in the Air Force.
I would think that sooner or later the Air Force is going to have to justify having higher paid officers flying these things compared to the Army enlisted.
I just saw a UAV story today on Fox. It had me wondering about this. I would think space travel faces the same issues.
The article fails to cover a significant “unintended consequence” of what will happen to the watch industry when there are less pilots buying their big “pilot watch” models....LOL!
Sure, we are currently fighting a terrorist enemy who has absolutely no air forces (I don't mean the Air Force as a service branch, but as a weapon) at all, and we have complete air superiority, both in Iraq and Afghanistan, and points in between.
But what happens when we go up against China? Or Russia, or God knows who else? With a modern air force I could sweep your UAVs from the sky. With a manned air fighter, armed with modern radar and sensors, it would take a matter of hours. Then, assuming air superiority, I take out your launch bases and facilities. Later I can threaten your supply lines and depots, troops in the field, and even your civilian homelands.
And while we could develop antiair UAV’s, do note that we've actually had these arrayed against us for decades; they're called SAMs. And yet manned aircraft has competed against these very well also. Ask the Israelis if you doubt me.
This may be a bit of envy mixed in (I was two weeks from commissioning when the AF took my pilot slot away) but my 14 year old son would probably be a better UAV operator, not need to wear a green bag, and would do it without “flight” pay.
Flight pay!? Give me a break.
Dudes, learn to love it or get RIFed, it’s happened before...
>>> A recent air force decision to transfer 100 pilots a year from flight school (where they just graduated) to UAV duty was very unpopular. The air force had asked flight school graduates to volunteer for this, but none did so.
These Lieutenants were not thinking strategically. I can sympathize with a Lieutenant’s desire to fly the big planes, but there is a lot to be said for getting in on the ground floor of what anyone can see will be a big part of the future Air Force.
Human capacity for enduring high-g acceleration has increasingly been a limiting factor in aircraft performance improvement. With the pilot removed from the vehicle, this limiting factor is also removed, so I would suspect that future air engagements could put pilot-occupied craft at a distinct disadvantage to the RPV’s, provided that the remote control system for the RPV is sufficiently responsive to pilot direction, and coordination of the action of multiple RPV’s does not lead to excessive confusion and “unfortunate encounters” with each other.
At that point, the next performance barrier would be the response time of the human pilot’s neural system, which is what would lead to removal of the “human element” entirely, as fictionalized in the “Skynet” of the Terminator series, or as popularized in speculative fiction and futurist speculaton in the notion of the “singularity”, promoted by Vinge and Kurzweiler
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
My concern with combat UAVs is the delay between threat recognition and response.
Notice the delay in responses when an interview takes place over worldwide distances?
Most/all of our UAVs are flown from the US. The signal is sent up to a satellite, then down to the UAV. There’s a half second + delay.
Could make a difference in evasive action.
Another possible trouble spot, EMP/ nuclear cloud/natural or created atmospheric anomalies destroying communications.
Then what?