Idea of Pilotless Combat Planes Is Taking Off

Capt. Gary G. Presuhn, an Air Force navigator who helps fly some of the nation’s hottest new jets off the desert runways of Edwards Air Force Base, is sitting inside a simulated aircraft cockpit in a medical research laboratory here, wearing a bizarre, bug-eyed helmet that makes him look like Darth Vader and feel like Luke Skywalker.

Wires trail away from the helmet to an electronic device that monitors his eye movements.

Presuhn, 33, is peering into the future of aerial warfare. And curiously, he’s not in it.

If scientists, engineers and dreamers here at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base can harness technology to their vision of the future, computers one day will do all or most of what Presuhn does now, flying in the second seat of supersonic military planes and providing crucial assistance to the pilot.

Replace Pilot Too

Eventually, scientists hope, the same computers might even take over the duties of Presuhn’s partner, a jaunty 33-year-old pilot named Robert H. Bolling.

Presuhn’s high-tech helmet, a sort of wrap-around instrument panel that tells its wearer everything from his plane’s altitude to the approach of enemy missiles, is concrete evidence that--after years of resistance by tradition-minded brass--the American military is beginning to accept the idea of replacing scarce and vulnerable men with thinking machines.

The Pentagon has devised a master plan for developing and deploying pilotless vehicles. The Pentagon blueprint directs the services’ top brass to pool their efforts to build drones for a wide range of military missions, including battlefield reconnaissance and overhead support for moving columns of tanks and troops.

The master plan “takes these vehicles out of the hobby shop and puts them under more centralized management, where they’ll have higher visibility,” one Pentagon official said.

Smart machines hold enormous promise, experts say. They will be able to do many of the things humans now do, thereby helping the military cope with expected shortages of trained personnel. They will be able to do some things no human could do, increasing the capability and punch of American forces. And they will permit U.S. commanders to order up valuable but--for human pilots--suicidal battlefield assignments without concern for casualties.

So great is the potential value of the new pilotless weapons and tactics to the future of American military strategy that the new treaty with the Soviet Union banning medium-range nuclear weapons explicitly reserves the right of each side to develop and deploy unmanned and unarmed planes within the treaty’s 300- to 3,000-mile range--for surveillance and other purposes.

‘Super Cockpit’

The particular research program for which Presuhn is an experimental subject is dubbed “Super Cockpit.” Its goal: To present all the information a pilot needs so efficiently that he will be able to fly alone, without his back-seat aide.

“Super Cockpit” is part of a Pentagon-wide reassessment of the role of men aboard military aircraft.

For years, movement toward developing and adopting high-tech equipment to reduce the direct role of humans in wartime skies has been slowed--often stymied--by traditional attitudes among senior military officials, who see some of their most cherished traditions, their most deeply felt views of themselves and their professional futures, threatened by such devices. Especially among senior Air Force brass, flying combat aircraft has been the sine qua non of most professional careers.

“If you don’t have pilots flying, the service’s principal mission disintegrates,” as one Air Force officer put it. Similar attitudes are reflected in the Air Force maxim that “You can’t pin wings on a cruise missile.”

Nevertheless, the new movement toward using computers more and humans less aboard combat aircraft is gathering speed, propelled by a powerful combination of factors:

--As a result of overall population trends, military manpower experts say, the pool of potential airmen is shrinking and will continue to do so at least into the next century.

--The cost of training men to fly today’s front-line combat jets, now hovering around $6 million per pilot, is on the rise.

--Today’s combat aircraft can go farther and maneuver better when the burden of passengers is lightened, and the physiological limitations of human beings are becoming a serious drag on the design of future craft.

--The threats pilots face from the air defenses of the Soviet Union and even the Third World are growing, a point that hit home dramatically after Syrian missiles downed Navy pilot Lt. Robert O. Goodman over Lebanon in December, 1983.

Out of Danger

Faced with those developments, the nation’s military leaders and defense technologists have stepped up efforts to move men out of the cockpits--and out of danger--and leave the driving to machines. In addition to technological barriers, they are pushing hard against deeply ingrained attitudes within the services.

The Mercury astronauts were outraged when they learned that they would be replaced for the first test flight of the space capsule’s cockpit by a chimpanzee. The fledgling space program’s managers insisted the beast could be taught to work the necessary controls, and with less risk of tragic loss. The humans took it as a blow to their pride.

Twenty-nine years later, fliers like Presuhn, who at age 33 belongs to the first generation of the video era, are more philosophical about their eventual replacement, this time by computer software.

“My seat’s disappearing anyway,” Presuhn said. “In my life, it’s not going away. But eventually, I can see it’s going to be gone.”

But the Air Force’s top brass, who make budget decisions that affect the direction of aeronautical research, come from a different generation.

“We’re working in an environment where pilots rule the world,” said Thomas A. Furness, one of the lead engineers of the super cockpit. “And when you go to your general and say: ‘Hey, we aren’t going to need you anymore,’ that’s just not going to go very far.”

As a result, Pentagon history is littered with plans for unmanned aircraft--and those which would reduce the role of men--that died for lack of service support.

In 1978, for instance, the Air Force terminated a project called “Compass Cope,” a fast, high-flying drone designed for strategic surveillance and reconnaissance. The plane could fly and spy for long periods without refueling, and without the risk of being shot down like the U-2 piloted by Francis Gary Powers, whose capture and trial was a major embarrassment to the United States.

More recently, the Air Force chose to build a manned stealth reconnaissance plane, although many experts believe that having a human operator on board is unnecessary.

Similarly, the Air Force buried a proposal from the Carter Administration to expand the role of cruise missiles--which are essentially pilotless attack craft--in the long-range nuclear forces. Under the plan, the manned B-1 bomber would have been scrapped and the Pentagon instead would have built hulking airliners designed to lob the nuclear-tipped drones from the comparative safety of friendly airspace.

‘Blue Suiters’

With the advent of the Reagan Administration, the “blue suiters” of the Air Force successfully pressed their case for the B-1 bomber and the stealth bomber, both manned aircraft designed to penetrate Soviet airspace. While current plans call for the wide use of air-launched cruise missiles as well, the Air Force sees them as a back-up weapon rather than the sharp point of the U.S. nuclear arsenal.

Today, however, the forces that drive projects such as “Super Cockpit”--including a budget-minded and casualty-sensitive Congress--are beginning to overwhelm many, if not all, of the traditional objections. As a result, the Pentagon is forging ahead with several unmanned aircraft projects and with research efforts that threaten to make navigators and pilots dispensable.

How far the Air Force will go in allowing these research and development programs to become deployed systems will test the service’s commitment to building a combat force that is both lean and mean, even if it costs pilots their wings, say experts.

One factor pushing the Air Force from inside the Pentagon is the possibility that, if it fails to adopt the new technology quickly enough, other services will encroach on its aerial turf. Already, the Army, which has devised a strategy of striking Warsaw Pact forces deep behind the front lines before they can reach the battlefield, plans to rely heavily on unmanned reconnaissance drones, packed with sophisticated electronic jamming gear, to help pinpoint the quarry for artillery and other weapons.

‘Technology Is There’

“I see unmanned vehicles for many roles as a definite trend,” Donald Fredericksen, the Defense Department’s tactical warfare chief, has told Congress. “The technology is there. It’s clear that we can use them for a lot of missions that are too dangerous for men or too expensive to do with manned aircraft.”

The Defense Department is expected to pour some $6.5 billion into designing and building pilotless aircraft by 1995, according to one industry estimate.

Separately, as part of an effort to reduce but not eliminate the number of humans in the cockpit, the Air Force is spending $4.7 million this year and eventually may lay out more than $50 million to develop a “pilot’s associate,” a futuristic complex of sensors and computers that is designed to do the work now performed by a fighter jockey’s navigator.

‘Phantom Crew’

Program officials speak of designing a “phantom crew” to aid tomorrow’s pilots.

One day, Furness and his colleagues at Wright-Patterson envision a world of air combat in which a single pilot aloft in his command plane will direct the attacks of an army of “robotic wingmen,” who know no fear and leave no widows.

As a hint of things to come, the Air Force soon will replace some of its aging force of F-4 “Wild Weasels,” designed to attack the Warsaw Pact’s belts of air defenses, with a new unmanned vehicle dubbed “Tacit Rainbow.”

Fired from the belly of an aircraft, the Tacit Rainbow is called a “kamikaze drone.” It loiters over the radars that guide the Soviets’ air defense missiles to their targets, teases them into high-level activity, then destroys them by crashing into them.

After prodding from Congress, the Air Force also launched a similar “harassment” drone program called “Seek Spinner” with $60 million in December of 1987. The service tapped Boeing Military Aircraft Co., which had begun developing an attack drone called the “Brave” at its own expense since 1979 on the theory that it was an idea whose time would come.

The Air Force briefly supported the “Brave” program but dropped it in 1984, handing skeptics another bit of evidence that unmanned programs had few friends in the Air Force.

In some cases, the state of technology has made the move toward pilotless aircraft not only possible but almost necessary.

Engineers are finding that the greatest constraint to making tomorrow’s fighter jets faster and more agile is neither physics nor technology. It is the ability of the man in the cockpit to withstand the physical punishment of higher-performance flight.

One of the most troubling of the human factors is a phenomenon called “gravity-induced loss of consciousness,” in which a pilot blacks out when exposed to some of the maneuvers possible with modern aircraft.

The Air Force believes that gravity-induced blackouts have contributed to about 13 aircraft crashes since 1980.

Vivid Reminder

Here at Wright-Patterson, bioengineers are working with aeronautical engineers to lessen the power of gravity to make pilots lose consciousness. One such effort offers a vivid reminder of the Air Force’s desire to keep men firmly in the cockpit.

It is the X-31, an experimental aircraft to be built and flown by the Defense Department and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. The nation’s latest experimental plane, whose lineage extends back to the X-1 flown by test pilot Chuck Yeager, grew out of a pilotless plane called HiMAT, short for highly maneuverable aircraft technology.

HiMAT originally was designed to test maneuvers too stressful for a pilot. But a version of the plane won Air Force backing as the latest of the nation’s X-planes only after the pilot was returned to its cockpit. It then, according to defense sources, became an aircraft designed to test the limits of a flier’s physical endurance.

In the long run, some scientists believe pilots may become unjustified obstacles to the progress of maneuverability. For now, however, few believe that even Wright-Patterson’s magic can replace the judgment of a seasoned pilot when it comes to executing a last-minute change of plan or escaping a cleverly designed trap.

“The pilot brings to the system an adaptability, a skill and a cunning that we cannot reproduce with machines,” Furness said. “I’m not saying the pilot has to be in the airplane, but he has to be in the loop.”