661–670 of 693 posts
A B-17 once landed at an airfield in Belgium without any crew on board. Just by chance it was pointing in the right direction, with the right amount of lift and drag and thrust.
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You aren't going to get valid distance from a single platform like that. If you had a large scale integrated sensor network, then yes you can triangulate an F35 and track it. Except the F35 would switch to Wild Weasel mode and start shooting down your sensors (aka, SEAD missions) until it was safe to approach closely. -------- That's the thing, if the F35 is already in your face to take direct gunfire like that,bits…
> Except the F35 would switch to Wild Weasel mode and start shooting down your sensors Ie not performing CAS. As stated near the start of the thread, nor AC-130 nor F-35 would perform CAS against anything more dangerous than a flipflop army with a complete lack of AA capabilities. QED
F35 can perform both Wild Weasel and CAS missions. F35 is also cheaper than the AC-130 and responds faster due to much higher speeds (proper supersonic Jet vs Turbine).
Even in a CAS scenario, some scenarios will prefer an F35 over the AC-130 is the enemy is lightly armed and response time is a priority (traveling at 1200mph or faster vs 299mph means the F35 responds 4x faster)
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How do drones get around the issue of communications jamming? I suppose they have some way (autonomous would be one way), but it seems to me that if communications are cut off, having a pilot with human judgement to respond to changing conditions will almost always have some advantage. Although, you could get a pretty advanced autonomous system that responded to changes from a pre-programmed attack plan.
The plane-sized drones are capable of some autonomous operation. It may or may not be possible to spoof that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incid... The smaller drones are not usually autonomous. See the Starlink alleged incident. Inertial guidance is popular but very expensive to do accurately with laser gyros. I'm surprised there haven't been more "terrain following" systems. There's probab…
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The thing you’re thinking of is the pilot. If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents (in airframes with, and without ejection seats, where the last actions of the aircrew were steer…
> If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents One of the things I remember from Chuck Yeager's autobiography (his first one - I think he eventually had several) is that he called bull…
There are many incidents that prove this wrong. The comment above yours is one example.
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The thing you’re thinking of is the pilot. If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents (in airframes with, and without ejection seats, where the last actions of the aircrew were steer…
Will this always be true though? Not even thinking about advancements in AI, but from a human body g-force standpoint, surely those jets can already pull way more Gs than the pilots can handle. I doubt the software is doing that today but why couldn't there be maneuvers the plane could do at 15 Gs that would help it survive?
For one, the jets are engineered around the limits of the pilots. These are high performance military aircraft where every ounce of weight matters, the airframe isn’t over engineered to support 15g maneuvers. Ripping the wings off wouldn’t help in an emergency.
I made the point later that by the time the AI is a more capable aviator, with the SA to do what OP was suggesting, the pilot is redundant. Take them out, engineer the plane to make those 15g turns with the extra weight you save not having life support, seats, canopy, etc.
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The thing you’re thinking of is the pilot. If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents (in airframes with, and without ejection seats, where the last actions of the aircrew were steer…
> By the time a pilot ejects they’ve exhausted EVERY other option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain control at that point. See, you say that, but this one seems to have done a good job of flying off to who the fuck knows where after the pilot ejected.
The F-35 is really a game changer. What a shitbox
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Actually, no. A pilot might punch from a perfectly flyable aircraft that ran out of fuel and can't be glided in due to terrain. Or a plane that has no propulsion for other reasons. They might even punch from a plane with some fuel but damage that precludes landing--if they're over civilization they might point it into nowhere and punch so they come down over civilization.
Ok, and here we go with the armchair aviators. Time in a Microsoft flight simulator doesn’t give you expertise. I’ll just reiterate, by the time a pilot is ejecting from the aircraft, everything has been done. Read through the incident reports and find me an incident where this wasn’t done, cite it please. I can’t find one. https://www.airandspaceforces.com/docs/type/accident/
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> If the plane is capable of control, the pilot will move it on a trajectory away from populated areas if possible. Protecting innocent people on the ground in the case of an emergency was always top of mind, you can see this in the crash reporting for multiple real world incidents One of the things I remember from Chuck Yeager's autobiography (his first one - I think he eventually had several) is that he called bull…
Maybe Chuck Yeager was a selfish asshole. There are many incidents that prove this wrong. The comment above yours is one example.
> There are many incidents that prove this wrong.
No, there aren't, and your saying so is just a failure in logic. Literally every instance of a crash would have to play out the way you insist it should, with a pilot taking into account the presence of population centers before ejecting, in order to "prove this wrong."
The tag team duo of MiG pilots who crashed in Michigan a couple of weeks ago didn't even agree on whether it was time to eject. They certainly hadn't placed the plane on some kind of safe trajectory (it landed literally right next to an apartment building). For that matter, maybe that incident is somehow an argument for selfishness: if they hadn't punched out right when they did, they would have been outside the envelope for a safe ejection, and that would be two dead people for sure.
All that said, I don't think you and I would disagree on how pilots should handle the situation. I just don't think it plays out as well as we'd like every time.
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> By the time a pilot ejects they’ve exhausted EVERY other option to control the aircraft, no AI is going to regain control at that point. See, you say that, but this one seems to have done a good job of flying off to who the fuck knows where after the pilot ejected.
lol. The first incident I’ve ever seen where this happens. Just perfect that I pop off with absolute statements and then am proven wrong by the incident I was responding to. The F-35 is really a game changer. What a shitbox