UAV updateUAV operation now a career path in U.S. Air Force

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) now has 127 Predator and 31 Reaper UAVs in service, along with some 400 pilots to run them. The USAF crews can put about 36 UAVs into the air at any given time, which is three times as many as three years ago. Strategy Page reports that this small force, representing less than 5 percent of air force combat aircraft, is doing the most important work in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As we have reported in several stories, for nearly a decade now the USAF force has been struggling to recruit, train, and retain enough operators for its growing fleet of UAVs. The USAF has instituted a policy which will see 10 percent of recent graduates from pilot schools will spend three years operating UAVs, before going on to flying manned aircraft. In addition, the USAF is training non-flying officers to be UAV operators. Many of these officers could have been pilots, but were prevented from doing so because of physical limitations (poor eyesight or inability to handle the gyrations of aircraft).

Strategy Page writes that the USAF has long insisted that UAV operators already be manned aircraft pilots, and allowed most of them to spend only three years operating UAVs before returning to manned aircraft. This has limited the number of UAV operators available, and forced the air force to create a larger UAV operator training program than they would have needed if all UAV pilots were career UAV pilots. Some UAV pilots are now in it for their entire careers, and the air force is moving toward making it that way for all UAV operators.

The U.S. Army already uses NCOs trained specifically for UAV operation. The army has no operator shortage. The USAF only recently made UAV operator a career field, not a temporary assignment, as it had been for years. The USAF is now under pressure, both from within and from outside the service, to allow NCOs to be career UAV operators.

Now, a typical Predator crew consists of an pilot and one or two sensor operators. Because the Predator stays in the air for long stretches, more than one crew is used for each sortie. Crew shortages sometimes result in Predators being brought back to base before their fuel is used up.

There is also help on the way from the developers of flight control software. Many UAVs can fly quite well without any pilot at all. This is an adaptation of automatic pilot systems — which now consist mostly of software and sensors — which are now capable of doing practically all the flying for commercial aircraft. Strategy Page writes that it was thus no big jump to install these systems in UAVs and let them go on automatic. Global Hawk UAVs are sent across the oceans on automatic pilot — including take-offs and landings. Using more of these systems for Predator and Reaper would also eliminates many of the human-error problems.

The sorties Predators and Reapers fly last, on average, about eighteen hours. Each sortie results in finding about two targets. About 15 percent of these sorties were in direct support of ground troops under fire, and about 20 percent were in support of ground troops engaged in raids. For the ground troops, the UAVs are the most important aircraft up there. The army has its own GPS guided rockets and artillery shells, but it does not have enough UAVs constantly to monitor the battlefield.

The fact that during the past decade most UAV operators served for three years before moving on to other assignments has had one advantage: there is now a growing body of knowledge of what works and what does not. Strategy Page reports that this has led to the establishment of a “graduate school” (the “Weapons School” or “Top Gun” course) for Predator and Reaper operators. This insures that useful combat knowledge is not lost, bur rather captured and passed on to other UAV operators. This is already paying off in ways that are typically kept secret (many of the UAV operational techniques are kept secret, lest the enemy have an opportunity to defeat them). The growing success of these UAVs indicates that the knowledge is there and useful. The UAV Weapons School also develops new tactics, like the use of UAVs for taking out enemy air defenses so that bombers, cruise missiles, or heavily armed UAVs like Reaper) would be able to go in and hit other targets. This includes developing tactics for entirely robotic operations. UAVs need this for when they lose communications and have to get back to base or complete their mission. “Nothing radically new here. Cruise missiles have been seeking out and destroying targets, on their own, for decades, but the new generation of UAVs are being trained, or programmed, to deal with more complex situations,” Strategy Page concludes.