USAF/USN 6th Gen Fighters - F/A-XX, F-X, NGAD, PCA, ASFS News & Analysis

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Josh_TN said:
I think the limiting factors are production rate and pilot quantity even more than price. If you want another hundred or two aircraft per year to become available, you are not getting there this decade with the F-35 no matter how much you invest in the line, subcontractors, and training.
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I think the USAF still has no problem recruiting pilots. It's the ground crew that they're struggling with.


Josh_TN said:
CCA will be a much faster build using an off the shelf commercial engine. It also removes pilot training and likely a lot of maintenance - use them for training, and when they get to “high” hours on the airframe (probably an order of magnitude less hours than a manned a/c) just box it up and pre position it to the Pacific as an expendable. Rinse repeat until you have a large forward based force in theater.
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I mean, there's still maintenance you need to do per flight hour, but you can let normal planes sit and fly less than 50hrs a year without causing much trouble. So I'd imagine that CCAs will be at least as "low hour" in that sense.

That said, I totally agree with the "Box it up and ship to the Pacific as expendable" concept.
 
Well I imagine a UAV just has less systems to go wrong from a maintenance point of view. And I bet a commercial engine outlasts the aircraft by thousands of hours. And depending on how complex your UCAV is (I’m a fan of smaller and simpler), maybe there’s no radar to go wrong either. And if it’s really hard to repair: tear off the the wings and engine and anything else fairly easily removed and just trash the thing. If it a Williams 44 engine, that’s probably almost half the cost anyway. Don’t do maintenance; do rapid manufacturing.
 
quellish said:
Fewer that could kill the pilot, sure
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And no cockpit indicators/displays to crap out, no OBOGS to asphyxiate the pilot, no ejection seat needing maintenance, etc ad nauseam.

I think better than half the cockpit gripes on the 727s I worked on were instrument faults, not sensor faults. And on a drone, you only have to check that sensor. Control station you have it command a second drone for a few minutes, if the same issue pops up there it's the station not the drone.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I think the USAF still has no problem recruiting pilots. It's the ground crew that they're struggling with.
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USAF is around 2000 pilots short as of 2023. The training pipeline is coming a little short of targets (by a couple hundred people) mainly because the T-38 force is too broke to fly the necessary training sorties. But the real killer is retention. Airlines pay better and get you home on a regular schedule.

www.airandspaceforces.com

Hundreds of Airmen Stuck Waiting To Start Pilot Training As Shortage Persists

More than 900 Airmen are waiting to start pilot training, the result of aging aircraft, few civilian instructors, and other issues.
www.airandspaceforces.com www.airandspaceforces.com
 
GTX said:
www.twz.com

Everything New We Just Learned About The Collaborative Combat Aircraft Program

The Air Force's CCA plans have opened a path to new ways of doing business and concepts of operations that could radically change the force.
www.twz.com www.twz.com
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So Increment 1 is looking at ~$25mil per CCA.


TomS said:
USAF is around 2000 pilots short as of 2023. The training pipeline is coming a little short of targets (by a couple hundred people) mainly because the T-38 force is too broke to fly the necessary training sorties. But the real killer is retention. Airlines pay better and get you home on a regular schedule.

www.airandspaceforces.com

Hundreds of Airmen Stuck Waiting To Start Pilot Training As Shortage Persists

More than 900 Airmen are waiting to start pilot training, the result of aging aircraft, few civilian instructors, and other issues.
www.airandspaceforces.com www.airandspaceforces.com
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And airlines aren't hiring many fighter pilots anymore. They're directly hiring tanker and transport pilots, especially when they have hours in 737s or 767s that can transfer over.

But let's be honest here. By the time a pilot has 8 years in and has completed the initial service obligation, they're an O3 getting looked at for O4. And once you hit O4, you stop flying planes and start flying desks. So everyone who joined the USAF to be a pilot is going to be looking at leaving once they don't get paid to fly anymore.
 
Scott Kenny said:
So Increment 1 is looking at ~$25mil per CCA.



And airlines aren't hiring many fighter pilots anymore. They're directly hiring tanker and transport pilots, especially when they have hours in 737s or 767s that can transfer over.

But let's be honest here. By the time a pilot has 8 years in and has completed the initial service obligation, they're an O3 getting looked at for O4. And once you hit O4, you stop flying planes and start flying desks. So everyone who joined the USAF to be a pilot is going to be looking at leaving once they don't get paid to fly anymore.
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Going forward planes are probably going to be pilot optional, especially with strong AI. I don’t think it is as far fetched as it once seemed at this point.
 
I think that pilot optional planes will start to come true in the 6.5 generation then be reality in the 7th generation especially with AI control so this could mean that we are starting to see the end of the line of actual fighter pilots which will be a good thing in the long run.
 
siegecrossbow said:
Going forward planes are probably going to be pilot optional, especially with strong AI. I don’t think it is as far fetched as it once seemed at this point.
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I don't think that's going to happen as fast as the pundits are claiming.

I mean, general/strong AI has been "10-20 years away" since the 1970s, and we're still not there yet despite all the work that has been put into it.

My best bet is that pilot-optional aircraft won't happen before the 7th generation of jets. Late 2080s or maybe even 2100.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I don't think that's going to happen as fast as the pundits are claiming.

I mean, general/strong AI has been "10-20 years away" since the 1970s, and we're still not there yet despite all the work that has been put into it.

My best bet is that pilot-optional aircraft won't happen before the 7th generation of jets. Late 2080s or maybe even 2100.
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You are being too pessimistic. We do not need strong enough of an AI to do everything a human being does. It just needs to be trained on dataset for fighter pilot specific tasks.
 
siegecrossbow said:
You are being too pessimistic. We do not need strong enough of an AI to do everything a human being does. It just needs to be trained on dataset for fighter pilot specific tasks.
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Right.

And I think that will take until the 7th generation combat aircraft arrive to get that level of AI.

I hope to be proven wrong, but I expect it to take that long.
 
Given the pronounced development in large data models recently, I think by end of decade we’ll see CCAs operating completely independently within limited circumstances/areas. I think it simply won’t be challenging to identify targets and respond to them as a group. How difficult is it to recognize a target as hostile, or at least not friendly, and fire a couple AAMs into it? When it comes to air combat maneuvering, AI has already bested pilots. And the advantages of expendable aircraft who don’t need pilots is going to be too tempting not to use.
 
Josh_TN said:
Given the pronounced development in large data models recently, I think by end of decade we’ll see CCAs operating completely independently within limited circumstances/areas. I think it simply won’t be challenging to identify targets and respond to them as a group. How difficult is it to recognize a target as hostile, or at least not friendly, and fire a couple AAMs into it? When it comes to air combat maneuvering, AI has already bested pilots. And the advantages of expendable aircraft who don’t need pilots is going to be too tempting not to use.
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Air targets yes, ground targets no.
 
Josh_TN said:
There are already munitions that autonomously ID and engage ground targets. Outside geofencing them, I don’t see why they couldn’t engage ground targets.
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Yeah, you might not want to use them for CAS, but I can totally see AI driven CCAs doing work on behind the lines targets.
 
My first take is that OBSS carries a radar and more fuel, with control surfaces optimized for low speed, higher endurance, and that OBWS is a pair of BVR AAMs and no radar (IRST?) with more swept wings of thinner cord, narrow nose, and lighter fuel load.

I would also wager that increment 1 CCA is more of the later type, with the manned component fulfilling the sensor role until later iterations.
 
So, the XQ-67 is basically the CCA9?

CCA9 - ISR and Comms for mission type.
LO (as opposed to VLO)
1000nmi range
Synthetic Aperture Radar and maybe EO eyeball.
Takeoff from roads or runways
 
Scott Kenny said:
So, the XQ-67 is basically the CCA9?

CCA9 - ISR and Comms for mission type.
LO (as opposed to VLO)
1000nmi range
Synthetic Aperture Radar and maybe EO eyeball.
Takeoff from roads or runways
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I would not assume the Mitchell exercise’s notional CCAs have any relationship with real aircraft.
 
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I wonder at what point the manned fighter will be fully phased out as each generation of UCAVs progresses? Could the 6th be the last?
 
Somehow I do not think that the 6th generation will be the last truly manned fighter we would quite possibly have to wait until the 7th generation for that to happen.
 
In_A_Dream said:
I wonder at what point the manned fighter will be fully phased out as each generation of UCAVs progresses? Could the 6th be the last?
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Definitely...though I would argue that the current 5th Gen should be.
 
Josh_TN said:
I would not assume the Mitchell exercise’s notional CCAs have any relationship with real aircraft.
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They seem to have come from proposed or flying drones, though.

There are several different drones that can meet each of the low end requirements.



In_A_Dream said:
I wonder at what point the manned fighter will be fully phased out as each generation of UCAVs progresses? Could the 6th be the last?
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Depends on how quickly the AI pilots develop to the level where you could have a single manned plane leading an entire strike package of CCAs (that may end up being the definition of 7th generation fighters, so no human pilots would then be 8th generation).
 
That was exactly what I was thinking when I first saw the design pedrospe. :cool:
 
Circling back to the OBSS/OBWS discussion, something I did not realize about the Gambit platform is that the engine is not actually part of the core components. GA specifically states that a more fuel efficient engine can be used for the Gambit 1 configuration. So the performance differences between the weapon station and sensor station could be quite dramatic, given not just different control surface and forward fuselage arrangements but different power installations as well. I guess with fly by wire and computer modeling, having very different engine masses and outputs is not a major problem?
 
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