Eventually, those planes could also be controlled by manned aircraft or Helo's for a human situational awareness. Even Marines or Soldiers on the field.

 

That is super cool. I just hope that they don't eventually phase out great fighter pilots and fun airplanes to be in.

 

I'd remain more than slightly skeptical of that-- had UAVs evolved to their original concept, like the backpack types that are in service, sure. But the new gen stuff is hugely complex with a LOT of gear required to talk to them. That's not something that's going to get lugged around in the field, and they need a pilot to fly.

Something like this is really not very useful for CAS or any other close-in environment-- doesn't carry any useful weapons and the situational awareness sucks compared to a pair of eyeballs in the sky. All they're really good for is blowing stuff up from afar when we really don't want an aircraft there and the environment is too chaotic for a cruise missile.

I'd rather they blew the money on new A-10s.

 

They will be far more capable then we can imagine at the moment. But they are working on manned warplanes having the ability to take it over, even partially.

 

I suppose, though I don't know that I'd want to have the workload of flying two aircraft at the same time, especially when one presumably has the potential to crash into me if it all goes pear shaped.

I dunno, it just smokes of a solution looking for a problem. The only way I could see controlling one from the air working, would be to feed it GPS/nav waypoints and tell it to go here and look at this-- but how useful is that, really, with awacs, satellites, existing drones and suchlike.

I just don't see UAVs displacing eyeballs in warplanes in any practical sense, any more than missiles replaced guns or multi-role F/A aircraft replaced the A-10, F-14, etc.

 

Well as someone who has spent a lot time flying in war zones, I wouldn't mind one bit if a UAV took the risks instead of me. Of course it's not "sexy", but it's lots better than getting killed.

 

So badass it's crazy!

 

I don't know about the "flying" it from another aircraft aspect as much as they are designed to pipe their intel feeds to multiple locations. So it is very probable a manned aircraft in theater could get the feed from the onboard sensor package from one of these.

 

My bad...

 

It's kind of like a GT3 with PDK I guess.