For those in the aerospace industry, are we seeing any movement towards unmanned commercial airplanes? Are the impediments mostly technical or social? Any rough timelines?
In a combat aircraft the advantages for getting rid of the pilot are numerous: less weight & volume for the pilot and their associated support kit, eliminating the pilot allows for plane geometries that are just not possible with a human onboard, eliminating the pilot enables maneuvers that would turn a pilot to jelly, etc. The pilot is probably the most expensive component of a combat aircraft. Eliminating the pilot opens up new mission profiles (e.g. you don't have to worry too much about the aircraft getting back to base.)
For a commercial aircraft the benefits of going unmanned are not as pronounced and in some cases are non-existent. In addition to the lack of benefits, you introduce additional costs related to liability (you can always blame pilot error for a problem, but if there is no pilot then it is the airlines fault for either not maintaining the system properly or for selecting the system in the first place) and the fact that passengers are not going to trust this system anytime soon.
The impediments are almost completely social, but the benefits are so slight that it does not make much sense to bother aiming for completely unmanned. What you are going to see (and in fact what has been happening for years now) is the increasing automation of cockpit tasks. There will always be a human being "at the controls" for the forseeable future, but what that actually means and how much active control they are exercising is going to be slowly changing.
Great observation. The primary advantage I saw (reduced pilot errors, responsible now for ~3/4 of all aviation accidents) is a liability for the airline and the manufacturer.
I think this is a common misperception. I believe the operational risk is that manuevers above 6g (varying on pilot and G-suit) reduces blood flow to the brain (by forcing it into the legs) and cause a blackout. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G-LOC Blackouts, even for a few seconds, can be devastating in the middle of a dogfight. I believe there is software in modern fighter jets for just when pilots blackout but I can't find it on google right now.
It's got to exist on the web somewhere :-)
"Learn how hackers can bring down planes into buildings at 5"
When I moved from Vancouver to San Francisco I found it completely bizarre that they required Drivers for BART. It took me a couple years to get over that.
That reminds me of the 'Soft Walls' concept for fencing aircraft to where they belong:
http://softwalls.eecs.berkeley.edu/
It's like DRM for flight routes!
Unless something like this happens: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_232 . Then there's absolutely no replacement for a human being or three in the cockpit, and the public and the FAA know it. A pilot's salary or two is not too much to pay to protect the lives of several hundred people once in a while, even if it's otherwise unnecessary.
The military believes it, too, and the jets they fly have a higher likelihood of encountering life or death situations such as having pieces shot off and needing to get home. While there may not be pilots in the jets in the next generation, they'll be flying them for a while yet, and commanding them for a long time. The battlefield is too difficult, complex, and important for anything else. Once someone gives the order to drop a bomb, they'll trust software to execute the order efficiently and correctly. But it's going to be a human being giving the order for a long time. Possibly forever.
There are some jobs that won't be done by software until it can pass a Turing test. Software may be able to do the job in the vast majority of cases, and in some societies that may be good enough. Socially speaking, in this society, it isn't.
Radar guided missiles are easily defeated with modern ECM. Despite what the salesmen will tell you, in a real fight you have to get in and knife the f*&kers.
The same happens with remotely piloted vehicles. If you ever go up against even a modestly sophisticated adversary they will show phenomenal pluck and ingenuity. See serbian downing of an F-117 for an example.
Human pilots will be needed for some time to avoid having your toys fall out of the sky or stolen and used against you.
It was true back then, too - it was a good 25 years between when aircraft carriers were invented in WW1 and when they sank their first vessel at Coral Sea. But new technology opens up new tactics and new economies of scale that can fundamentally change the rules of battle.
What if you didn't care about having your toys fall out of the sky, for example? Make them so cheap that you can literally blanket the sky with them. Send up thousands of computer-piloted missile-aircraft. If they get shot down, who cares? If they shoot each other down, who cares? If they get stolen by the enemy and used to shoot down your own missile-craft...well, that's what was happening before anyway.
But you could throw up a curtain so dense and so shifting that it's impossible for anything to fly through them. And that's exactly what a potential adversary of the U.S. wants: nullify American air power so the f#&kers on the ground can knife our guys. It doesn't matter if they shoot down 10 of their own missile-craft for every one of ours. If they can put up 100x as many, that still equals no aircraft in the sky for Uncle Sam.
There was a recent wargame that followed a strategy much like this, except that instead of computer-controlled aircraft it used human-controlled small boats launching cruise missiles (that other automated-pilot air weapon):
US air superiority is a system that includes AWACS (enabling better situational awareness), GPS (enabling JDAM/SDB for example), tankers, and a constellation of factors other than "mano a mano" with bullets. UAVs are already an integral part of the mix.
There are a few details on http://www.strategypage.com/htmw/htada/articles/20051121.asp...
First a primer on websites reporting military/intelligence affairs: two sites that occupy the ends of the credibility spectrum, http://smallwarsjournal.com and http://www.debka.com.
The first is a forum for junior military officers and professional analysts for discussing tactics and strategy. The articles all have by-lines, mostly by Captains and Majors (i.e. recently promoted Captains). The editorial board is made up of professionals. You will never read any classified information here. You may read some good war stories, but mostly you will read professional treatments of modern tactics by professionals for professionals.
On the other extreme many consider debka a conduit for the Mossad. Good luck separating the information from the disinformation on this site, but the articles can be a good read, if you can deal with the wilderness of mirrors.
In between these extremes keep in mind that intelligence analysis is about connecting the dots. Even the professionals seldom know anything for sure, and sources and means of gathering information are usually more important than any individual datum. If it makes it to print (or html), there’s probably a reason.
So where does this leave http://www.strategypage.com ? Let’s look at the staff bios on the about us page. Of the four "staff" exactly one has any military/intelligence background at all. "...author (over 20 books), wargame designer (over 100 designed and publisher of over 500), defense advisor (since the 1970s), pundit (since the 1970s) and general troublemaker. Served in the US Army artillery (1961-64) as a Spec/4." His website, http://www.jimdunnigan.com , lists some of his books, and more bio info including "Various Department of Defense and State Department agencies called on me to give lectures or just have a chat." I guess that was his "defense advisor" gig. He’s certainly a dedicated amateur. If luck had broken his way a little better, perhaps he could have been Tom Clancy. There’s also a handy "write for us" page. If you write well enough and don’t make any flaming technical errors, you can make some coin.
In short, I don’t think this site would even attract placing any real disinformation. So how about the article itself?
First, no by-line.
Secondly the protagonist’s name, "Zoltan". Sure sounds made up to me, but that’s just my opinion.
The way the piece is put together has the feel of a composite, somebody who did some research and threw this story together. If a real reporter got the real story from a real Colonel (and covered up his identity with a pseudonym) he could have written for a more prestigious publication or wire service and made better money. Still...not entirely implausible.
For now I’m sticking to my theory of the shoot-down only because accounts I read right after the incident described the wreckage of the aircraft landing largely intact (a little hard to believe since the fuselage is composite) with bullet holes and, if I recall correctly, the pilot ejected and survived (a little less likely after a missile strike). Hence my belief in heavy machine gun fire from a pursuit aircraft. Also the Russians really wanted to get their hands on one of these babies, even a crashed specimen. So it’s easy to imagine their risking an agent inside NATO to pull this off.
Reading this stuff on the web is not like reading hacking tips. The background is more important than the foreground, and you can never be sure.
I understand your point about the background of the website. However, in this case I thought it was a fairly well known story, and there are quite a number of other accounts.
eg: ""At times, they acted like amateurs," Dani said, listing some ways the Serbs managed to breach NATO communications security, including eavesdropping on pilots' conversations with AWACS surveillance planes.
"I personally listened to their pilots' conversations, learning about their routes and bombing plans," Dani said."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2005-10-26-serbSerbian-st...
And:
"A network of spies and observers would report F-117A takeoffs from Italy’s Aviano Air Base. Coupling this intelligence with tweaked radars, the Serbians fired several surface-to-air missiles almost blindly, hoping for a hit."
http://www.airforcetimes.com/news/2008/04/airforce_nighthawk...
I thought that it was shot down by SAM missiles was generally accepted. The NATO spy part was more interesting, because there was reasonable support for the Serbs within some parts of NATO, so that isn't out of the question.
The "people listening for aircraft" theory makes a lot of sense, too, though - it's easy, and it's been proven to work before.
(Also, Zoltan is a reasonably common Hungarian name: http://www.google.com.au/search?q=name+Zoltan or http://nameberry.com/babyname/Zoltan - as you are no doubt aware, Hungarian names are quite common is some parts of the former Yugoslavia, and Zoltan Danni is of Hungarian decent)
Today planes can take off and land using only software and radio signals, even when the pilot can't, like no visibility when cloudy.
The problem is that computer understanding of the surroundings is NULL. Today there is no software that could understand(well) that there are birds(or small planes) on the way that are going to be eaten by your engines, and damage it.
The only technologies that work are active, like LIDAR, this is going to change, but first on vehicles with less degrees of freedom. Trains(1FD) before ships(2FD) before cars before planes.
This is just fearmongering. Birds, sure, but airplane engines are designed to ingest small birds and for the most part can handle it reasonably well. Small planes still must have a transponder, and TCAS systems will identify and warn of ADS-B signals ("squawk"), even if the smaller plane has not been equipped with a TCAS transceiver.
There is a rule in engineering, never underestimate a 900km/hr projectile. And I have seen myself engines birds test that are mandatory on every turbine.