Report: France, Britain to build unmanned fighter jet

Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) ^ | Feb 16, 2012,

[sukhoi-30mki]

Report: France, Britain to build unmanned fighter jet

Paris - French President Nicolas Sarkozy and British Prime Minister David Cameron are to unveil plans to develop an unmanned European fighter jet at a summit in Paris on Friday, Les Echos financial newspaper reported.

The paper on Thursday quoted unnamed sources as saying the two governments aimed to build a 'prototype of an unmanned stealth aircraft by 2020.'

'This is clearly bilateral cooperation for the post-Rafale and post-Eurofighter (era),' the paper quoted a source as saying.

The Rafale fighter jet is produced by France's Dassault Aviation.

Eurofighter - a consortium of European aerospace and defence group EADS, Britain's BAE Systems and Italy's Alenia/Finmeccanica - produces its chief rival, the Typhoon.

Dassault scored a key victory over Eurofighter in January, when India's government entered exclusive talks with Dassault on supplying 126 fighter jets.

The new aircraft planned by France and Britain would be built by Dassault and BAE Systems, according to Les Echos.

Friday's Franco-British summit between Sarkozy, Cameron and their defence and foreign ministers will deal mainly with defence issues

[ThunderSleeps]

Two (well, the two biggest) problems I foresee with unmanned fighter jets...

One, "bringing back" sufficient situational awareness to the pilot/operator. Maybe a complete bubble/mock-up of a cockpit would do it. I still think dogfighting is going to be problematic. Strike, sure, we have RPAs that do that now. BVR air-to-air missile engagements, not much different. But mixing it up, that is going to be a problem.

Two, the data link. For an RPA, by definition there has to be a data link between aircraft and pilot. Something bringing back sensor data and sending out command and control. That link is a vulnerability. It isn't stealthy, it is an emitter. It can be jammed/taken-down. It can maybe even be hacked and you could find your own weapons turned against you. (remote possibility, we'll assume their encryption is good enough) If you put in a local autonomous mode in case the link is lost that is fine, but it is going to drastically reduce mission effectiveness while increasing risk of loss of the RPA. (An RPA that has gone "lost-link" and is executing an autonomous RTB is going to be a sitting duck for an enemy to engage air-to-air.)

So I don't know. Interesting technical and operational challenges.

[PilotDave]

Morons. Not gonna work in our lifetime, maybe never. Would anybody fly in a drone airliner? Air Combat is 10000 times more complex...

[relictele]

French ingenuity: the pilot can surrender before the flight takes off.

[hannibaal]

Isnt the problem with fighters now that they cant exceed the limitations they have at present simply because the pilot wont be able to cope with the g force?

[ThunderSleeps]

Yes. There are counter arguments where RPAs (remotely piloted aircraft) have a distinct advantage. For example, you don't have to have a canopy, ejection seat, oxygen system, heating/cooling, or display systems. These all take up space and add weight. Without a soft squishy pilot in there you're not limited to a few Gs in one particular orientation, briefly. You can pull huge G loads in any direction you care to design the airframe to handle, with no pilot to black out, red out, or otherwise turn to jello.

That's why many (most, all?) surface to air and anti-air missile systems are designed to pull big G loads. (numbers I've seen are roughly 3x max pilot tolerance) That way there is just about no possible way a piloted aircraft can turn inside them and evade. An RPA could enjoy a similar advantage, if you could get the "scene" back to the pilot with little or no latency, and provide a complete enough picture for dogfighting level situational awareness.

Also, another part of the G load limit on current airframes is simply due to service life limitations. The more and the harder you stress the airframe, the sooner it gets de-certified for flight due to metal fatigue. Though the several fighter pilots I know or have know are the kind of guys that aren't going to let a number on a gauge stop them from doing whatever it takes to win an engagement...

[sinsofsolarempirefan]

What happens when someone interrupts the wireless signal between pilot and machine? Iran managed to hack a US drone and bring it in...

[ThunderSleeps]

Best case, the UAV detects the loss, resorts to on-board autonomous programming and completes the mission.

Second best case, the UAV detects the loss, resorts to on-board autonomous programming, goes into a holding pattern for some amount of time while attempting to reacquire the signal, then aborts and returns to base.

Bad case, the UAV without human intervention is a sitting duck and gets shot down.

Really bad case, the UAV can't detect that it's command net is compromised and the enemy directs it to RTB and attack there.