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It's amazing what they did with Top Gun, making this stuff not look boring.

When airplanes get within gun range ("knife-fighting range") things are very interesting. Beyond visual range is just weapons management, but close-in it's energy management to optimize maneuvering to get to a killing position.

Also, it's much more interesting when you have something at stake besides losing a video game and having to restart.

I'm quite curious how this system would perform in WWII era dogfights where you had to worry about the stress on your plane, had to deal with engines that failed and stalled all the time and maneuvers that were much slower and closer to the enemy (plus no missiles).

By the end of WWII, properly maintained engines flown within parameters were pretty reliable. (So no pulling negative g's in a plane with a carburetor.) The concerns of fighter pilots at very close range or trying to evade when targeted by missiles can still be similar in certain regards to pilots trying to stay alive in WWII.

AI's would probably be very good at energy management and taking shots of opportunity.

Seems to me this gets a lot more interesting when they start building fighter jets without the assumption that a pilot will be in the plane at all. You can build much smaller, lighter planes without the need for life support systems or worrying about g-forces that will kill a human pilot.

I'll grant you that doing this in the US is going to be problematic because of ethical concerns, but there is definitely going to be some country that does it, and as soon as they do, they'll instantly gain air supremacy.

Aren't those called missiles or UAVs?

As in, we should consider why we have planes in the first place: it's to deliver some payload (bombs, missiles, or in the olden days, cameras for photography) to a specific place where you make use of that payload and then go home. Once you remove the human, you're not left with too many uses that can't be solved with existing technology.

The life-support weight and g-force worrying can be dropped, but I think parameters like wing-loading, range, load capacity, the radar and its power generation will set the size of a fighter plane to be pretty much that of a fighter, even if you drop the pilot.

The HiMAT basically demonstrated this. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be much information online about the program, however some books I've read note that the program was a success.

http://www.boeing.com/history/products/himat-research-vehicl...

Rudimentary fuzzy logic in this kind of platform should be able to defeat a human pilot regardless of the pilots cunning/unpredictability/other human aspects which movies trump as superior human features. But, practical requirements such as range, payload, loiter time, pork barrelling may mean that the platform is otherwise compromised.

Additionally in an era where things such as airborne lasers are becoming a reality, the whole meta may completely change.

You're saying modern air to air combat is relatively simple and doesn't require that much pilot skill? If that's the case, why do all the accounts of the 1991 and 2003 Gulf Wars claim pilot skill was perhaps the single largest advantage the Americans and British had over the Iraqis? (Not a rhetorical question; I don't know what the specifics of the task consist of, and I'm curious about the answer.)

Not saying this has any relation in this specific case, but both of those governments have made up similar lies about pilot ability (British in WWII with radar hidden by "pilots who eat carrots to improve eyesight" is the classic example) in the past to hide technological advancements.

In Gulf War 91, the Iraqi pilots were both skilled and combat experienced from the Iran-Iraq war. Although rigorously trained and highly skilled, very few USAF pilots flying operationally had actually previously experienced air-to-air combat.

Apart from technically superior radar and weapons systems, the USAF Weapons School[0] teaches USAF fighter pilots how to engage within the envelope of those weapons.

In the early part of the Vietnam war, the air-to-air missiles kept missing the target due to poor pilot training. The result of the Ault report[1] and subsequent TOPGUN[2] program worked to remedy the shortcoming in the training. The USAF FWS was created after seeing the results of the Navy TOPGUN training.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USAF_Weapons_School

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ault_Report

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Navy_Strike_Figh...

The last time I watched a documentary about dogfights, two stories about the gulf war ends in the Iraqi pilots losing situational awareness, and consequently dying by crashing into the ground.

It makes me wonder a little bit if their skills are vastly overestimated.

In the same Dogfights documentary, they also mentioned Iraqi MiG-25 pilots evading several AIM-7 radar guided missiles fired at the same jet. In other references, there were a few cases of MiG-25s evading USAF F-15 firing missiles at them, and making it back to base.

Experienced USAF pilots have hit the ground during combat operations. That doesn't mean they were not skilled pilots, just that they made a deadly mistake.

I'm not gulf war specialist, but most recent analysis predicts pretty consistently that if you pit decent to great pilots in F35 vs F35 with similar missiles, you get mutual kill every time. Same goes for any single plane that has BVR radar and missiles and off boresight close range missiles. Most 4th gen planes have these capabilities.

I didn't agree with this at first, but they claim that modern missiles are able to differentiate between heat signature of plane body and engine nozzle. Also modern missiles are capable of 50G turns. That G-loading tells nothing about turning circle, but it does tell surprisingly nicely how quickly you can deviate from straight line. Fighter plane loses every time from every angle at every speed.

The only problem of air-to-air missile dominance is that they burn through all of their fuel relatively quickly. Once that happens, maneuverability goes down really quick. So the "no escape zone" is crucial and it varies from missile to missile.

If you want to stay alive, you need to out-range or surprise the enemy. Either stealth, superior radar or longer range missiles.

It looks like fighters have become very expensive and very mobile SAM sites. It beats me why countries without aircraft carriers would ever pick F35. You can get ~50 trucks with Pirate IRST and METEOR missiles with the same price. More area covered at any given time while survivability goes up like hell I don't know what.

"That's really all modern pilots need to do."

Recorded conversations between ground support pilots and forward air controllers would disagree. Lots of very fast paced observation, pattern matching, orientation and tough judgment calls.

If we ever fight a competent air adversary I would imagine the AWACS to pilot conversations would be fascinating.

Learning to fly a plane is like learning to throw a baseball. It takes hours at most. Of course learning to beat a pro player at their entire game not just one activity, so as to get their job, is a little harder. An interesting observation of human judgment WRT the ratio of people who think they can go pro vs the people who have the skills to go pro is not terribly inspiring WRT AI pilots, they'll be lots of coders with bravado and not much action. And learning how to lead a team to a world series win isn't even definable at this time. But yeah, toss that ball over there when I say to do it, that's a solved problem. Likewise successfully accomplishing a combat mission is a lot more complicated than "and this is how to keep the wings level and that button makes things go boom". A really smart autopilot is going to help yet isn't the only thing necessary.

Note that its possible to send a man to do a cruise missiles job, or even a plain old missile's job. That doesn't imply a cruise missile can do everything a man can do, it just means the man was mismanaged to not take full advantage of his abilities.