The Silent Killer: Inside The Unmanned Ariel Vehicle (UAV)

Play Station, X-Box, Nintendo…throw it all away. The future is here, the drones are here. Just sit in the room, aim-select and fire !!!…

Unmanned aircraft missions have more than tripled in the last two years, so much so that the Air Force cannot train people fast enough to keep up with the demand. Until a few years ago unmanned aircrafts were mythical creatures whose existence only few could boast about. In recent years however, particularly after 9/11 unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have evolved tremendously and become fairly common knowledge thanks to the intense media coverage. The remote controlled plane that started off as an experimental aerial intelligence gopher for the Army during the Balkan wars in mid 1990s has long since transformed into a full-fledged weapons system.

MQ-1 Predator along with its deadlier brother MQ-9 are remote controlled spy planes that have an overwhelming demand among ground commanders in Iraq, Afghanistan as well as special operations in Pakistan. At this very moment about a dozen of them are encircling over enemy targets, observing everything in real time and capturing high resolution images such as license plates. Each month commanders, intelligence officers and ground troops benefit from 18,000 hours of live video. These UAVs track vehicles, scan convoy routes for explosives and of course, fire missiles. Unlike the more conventional jets like F-16, a Predator can remain above a target for 24 hours.

In a combat situation, a ground crew (10 crews for every 24 hour air combat patrol) launches a Predator in for example Iraq, and then hands over the plane via satellite link to a crew in the U.S. at either Creech, one of several Air National Guard bases or at a special-operations unit in New Mexico. One of two primary monitors shows the video feed from the plane’s cameras overlaid with a head-up display of the horizon, the plane’s altitude and other vitals. Another screen displays a graphic of the plane overlaying satellite maps of the landscape. There’s a joystick too, but it’s mostly for takeoffs, landings and chasing targets. Typically, drones follow a preprogrammed flight path.

The rise of the Predators has not come without its share of problems. The Air Force’s current strategy to pull combat pilots from their cockpits and retrain them to fly drones is depleting other squadrons and creating a shortage of pilots to fly manned planes. The education needed for drone pilots is comparable to that of earning a master’s degree and even the best pilots struggle with the learning process. Of the 200 Predators delivered to date, about one third of them have crashed catastrophically either due to aircraft malfunction or pilot error. One pilot executed a hard left at high speed (a feat that is routinely done in a manned combat plane) which the snowmobile engine Predator couldn’t handle and it flipped over and spiraled out of control. Several other operators accidently switched off the engine mid-flight. In one instance an operator even erased the onboard RAM and thus lost all hope of controlling the plane.

After being criticized for failing to create a dedicated career track for UAV pilots, the immediate goal of the Air Force is to increase the ranks of drone pilots from the current 400 to about 1,100 and also to boost unmanned combat patrols about 47% within the next 2 years. To achieve this, 100 airmen will go straight from the traditional 12-month undergraduate pilot training to Creech Air Force Base in Indian Springs, Nevada, where they’ll learn to operate the Predator and immediately begin flying combat operations.

The Air Force’s long term solution, however, is to develop a new program that aims to train non aviators for the job and create two pilot pipelines-one for manned flight and one for unmanned flight. As these aviators will not have to undergo the intense undergraduate training that pilots go through, their training will take nine months instead of 16. This month, eight captains with four to six years of experience in the service, and with little to no previous aviator skills, will graduate from the abbreviated track after logging just 20 hours of manned flight, versus the conventional 200.

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