What To Tell Kids About Future Aviation

The late and much-celebrated fighter pilot General Robin Olds delighted in telling the story of sitting in the front seat of an F-4 headed into visual-range combat in Vietnam and telling his younger backseater that he had it on good authority that what they were seeing wasn't actually happening. That is, the F-4 design brief called for a fighter with sophisticated radar and missiles, but no gun since dogfights were thought to be a thing of the past after the Korean war.

The MiG-17 begged to differ and it took the Air Force and Navy several years of painful losses to understand the defense planners had been wrong. The same argument is going on yet today as the latest generation of planners try to divine when the manned fighter or military aircraft of any kind will be displaced by either robotic or remotely piloted aircraft or some combination. This relates to the blog my colleague Jeff Van West wrote this week describing his son Baxter's passion for airplanes and flying. I've flown with Bax in the J-3 and he's a good stick and scary smart. He would like to someday fly in the military, but at age 13, he's a decade away from the start of a military flying career. Will there even be military cockpits to fly in a decade from now?

My bet is yes,despite the rapidly developing technology of unmanned flight. But that's not the salient point. Even though the military and commerical world will still have piloting jobs, it's the directionality that will be the problem.I think it will be a very different world in which the growth curve for unmanned flight will be near vertical while that for manned flight will be flat or in decline for much of military aviation. We've discussed this before in the context of what us geezers nearing the end of our flying careers should advise a young person wanting to go into professional aviation—as opposed to vocational general aviation. When I'm asked, my advice has been and continues to be to tread cautiously if you expect to commence a career in an actual military flying cockpit 10 years or more from now. They'll be there all right, but my guess is the demand will be slowly declining and thus the real action will be somewhere else. In-cockpitskills could be less relevant, or at least not much valued, in both military and commercial segments.

In this Air Force report, which gamely predicts a future dominated by unmanned aircraft, the service lays out the timeline. If you scroll down to page 48, you see that by 2025, the Air Force expects to have UAS completely integrated into worldwide airspace systems and that these systems will "enhance combat capability." Beyond that, it gets interesting. There's a tick mark for autonomous flight and something I hear about at every UAS event I attend: swarming. Use a little imagination and you realize this consists of AI-driven swarms of drones used tactically, either for defense or offense. Toward mid-century, there's a milestone labeled "auto target engage," whose meaning should be self-evident. As we reported last month, this technology may be further along than many of us imagine. AI has already demonstrated it can be a formidable ACM opponent.

But what's most illuminating about the Air Force's view of the future is in personnel requirements: "Personnel costs will shift from operations, maintenance, and training to design and development." In other words, the services will need fewer pilots, operators and maintainers in favor of more machine creators. "Fewer operators will be ‘flying' the sorties but directing swarms of aircraft."

If that sounds like a creepy vision of the future, it probably is, but it's interesting nonetheless and the would-be pilot romantic better be aware of it and seek the appropriate education and training. Sadly, that may not be traditional flight training, but computer science, robotics and artificial intelligence development. Even the cockpit of the future with a person in the loop will surely be more automated than mainstream aircraft are now. These are probably just beyond the 10-year time frame, but not too far beyond. The question isn't whether there will be manned cockpits, but that there will be ever fewer of them. As an aside, irony suffered a brutal death this week when theFAA opined that as many as 600,000 drone pilots will enter the registry and the Air Line Pilots Association, like a lonely beacon anchored in the 1930s, insisted these drone pilots should have flight tests, too. Sigh.

The Navy may have a particularly difficult nut to crack. During World War II, despite Billy Mitchell's best efforts, the Navy clung stubbornly to battleships as the core of the fleet, even after Pearl Harbor. Now the core is aircraft carriers, but are these already obsolete in the face of swarms of drones that may be deployed to attack them? Or the new carrier-killing missle the Chinese are supposedly developing?We may find out only after the first one is sunk, just as the battleship admirals contemplated the oily horror of Pearl Harbor on December 8th. Either way, it seems dubious to believe manned aircraft will have a broad role into, say, the 2030s. (That's not to say no role.)

Drawing these things to the attention of a young person interested in aviation may sound like burning dreams, but to do anything else is simply delusional, in my view. Give the kids the best information available and they'll figure it out. Ah, what am I saying? They've already figured it out. It's the parents who probably need the advice most, since they'll play a pivotal role in guiding the kids' education.

Oddly, in this context, general aviation may be the shimmering oasis, the last enclave of futile hand-eye coordination resistance in a world driven by robots. People come to GA because they like to fly, like to push and pull sticks and throttles and fool around with gadgets. New airplanes are increasingly more automated and perhaps some may become fully autonomous. But for the recreational flyer, where's the fun in that? Even if regulation wasn't easing—and there are definite signs that it is—general aviation will always have appeal, in my view. It may be much smaller and have fewer participants than it does now, but it'll be there. Isn't that at least a warm and cheering thought as a swarm of drones with a bad line of code deliver to your front yard 29 things you didn't order from Amazon Prime Air?