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I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: The day is RAPIDLY approaching where we will look at manned military aircraft the way the military viewed the Sopwith Camel by WWII.

I could not agree more. The pilot is adding less and less value in the cockpit while he is a HUGE liability. Electronic systems can "see" much better than he can. If he is shooting at things he only sees on a screen, he can be somewhere else looking at that same data on a different screen.

A crew of pilots punching clocks in Ohio somewhere is FAR less demanding than having the same crew in the cockpit over enemy territory.

Without a pilot in the plane, we could load them up with a cannister of radioactive waste. "Shoot it down if you want to. We don't mind!"

I saw a Bruce Willis movie called Surrogate a few weeks ago that was pretty good. It was about a near future where people could buy a “drone” human machine they could control from the comfort of their home. Eventually, almost everyone was at home and all the people in your office, driving on the freeway, etc., were actually these “surrogates”.

But the military part was interesting. A truck full of surrogates would be parked next to the battlefield and the controllers would be somewhere else. A man would control a surrogate into battle and when it was “killed”, they’d give him control of another one in the truck. It would hop out and join the battle until it too was damaged. The same guy would be given a new surrogate, and so on...

This just brings up something I’ve been cognizant of since the 80’s. That is, in 1969 I was amazed that some people that lived in the covered wagon days got to see a man land on the moon. Yet I have seen far more change in my life than any of them did. And what my children are going to see is beyond my comprehension. And so on.

It cannot go on much longer. In the past there was little, if any, non-political change from generation to generation. It has gotten to the point where we see more change in five years than there was in five generations, and it is only accelerating. Human beings cannot handle that sort of environment without cracking, either individually or collectively. We see it all around us and it too is accelerating.

I love technology but believe it is a two edged sword. And more and more it is becoming clear that the wrong edge is the sharp one.

And crew is an interesting word. You can go back to having a dozen people "on" your bomber again working various systems. You can also swap people in and out of jobs so you have your run of the mill crews handling take off, landing and flying to and from the mission area. While approaching and leaving the target area you can get your ECM specialists working flares, chaff and jamming. Then while over the target you can have your weapons specialist log in without needing him to sit around for six hours to do his few minutes of work.

I worry though that we won't dump the pilot on board until we start running into unmanned Chinese fighters doing 15-G turns which our pilots will gawk at like Typhoon and Mustang pilots watching a jet powered Me-262 zip into combat, shoot down a few plans and then just as quickly leave.

One big issue issue is control and broadcast timing of the data packets being used to control this beast. Assuming ultra fast switiching, there still is an issue of beaming commands 22ooo miles up to a sattelite and back down to the plane and them back again to the command center. Radio signals travel at the speed of light so to send a command to the plane, and assuming line of sight (though you might have to relay between several sattelites on some missions) will take at minimum about 230 miliseconds and more if the “plane” is beyond the direct command horizon and in need of secondary broad cast systems. That’s not counting packet switches and analog to digital and digital to analog circuitry.

Return data takes another 230 miliseconds which means there is a 1/2 second lag between ‘send’ and confirmation of “order received” Real time data and video will always be some 300ms to 1-2 seconds in lag unless they’ve invented ‘subspace radio” of some sort. Another words unless some missions are automatically programmed in, real time decision making is going to be problematic where as an onboard pilot can make faster decisions and effect instantaneous configuration changes as necessary.

Joy stick pilots in DC aren’t going to be flying thru Afghani canyons since by the time they saw the mountain coming and sent changes via their joy sticks, the plane would have crashed before it received the directional commands. Similarly, some bomb runs can be computerised on board an automatic plane, but forget split second manual bombing. GPS guided bombs certainly would help, but forget instantaneous reconfigurations.

Now one can cut communications times down by having command and control options closer to where the plane will be flying in, say an AWACS plane some 1000-3000 miles away or a temp military satellite say 150 miles up in orbit...then were talking about 5 to 10 milliseconds back and forth..

There still will be the need for pilots on certain missions where decision making needs to be quickly communicated to the equipment on board the plane, as opposed to waiting 1-3 seconds before the command comes in from a command center in the pentagon.