Eye in the Sky 3
Flying a fighter plane is a dangerous line of work. The pilot can expect risky combat situations such as hair-raising missions deep behind enemy lines, or having to attack enemy air defences which are specialised in destroying incoming fighter planes. And it's not made any easier, when Russia openly sells anti-aircraft weapons such as the 2S6M Tor. This mobile tank-like vehicle carries eight missiles and two rapid-fire 30mm cannons. No, flying a fighter is downright dangerous. And that's part of the reason why the United States Air Force is building UCAVs, or Uninhabited Combat Aerial Vehicles - or in plain English, pilotless fighters.
Around 1996, the U.S. Air Force Scientific Advisory Board released a 15-volume report called "New World Vista". Even today, one of the volumes written by this council of respected elders at the U.S. Air Force is still classified as Top Secret. But one of the unclassified new technologies that was flagged to appear over the next three decades was the Pilotless Fighter.
The trouble with today's fighter plane is that it's big and heavy and easy to see on radar. And then there's that bulky cockpit at the front for the pilot. It gives the fighter bad aerodynamics. In fact, to have an aerodynamically stable and efficient fighter with room for the pilot, it has to be above a certain size. The smallest supersonic fighter today is the Saab Gripen, which weighs seven tonnes empty and can carry three tonnes of weapons. Because a fighter plane is carrying a human, it has to be full of safety features and triple-redundant systems. Because it's so expensive, it has to be made tough to withstand years of use and abuse.
And there's another problem. Today's fighter plane can perform viciously hard turns of 20-Gs - and at 20-Gs, it can twist out of the way of most hostile missiles. . But the pilot, even in an Anti-G suit, will go unconscious at 9-Gs. We have the strange situation that the pilot made of mere flesh-and-blood is stopping the plane from being used at its full potential. (By the way, 20-Gs is the limit for today's jet engines. Above that, they go out of round, and the spinning blades scrape on the inside of the housing, and the engine self-destructs).
What the U.S. Air Force is looking at is something between a piloted fighter and a cruise missile. This Uninhabited Combat Air Vehicle wouldn't need any cockpit, life support systems or safety features. The USAF would be perfectly happy if it could survive just 10 missions. They could run the engines harder at higher temperatures and pressures and get better performance, and not worry about the reduced service life.
Such a plane could fly upside down, and so the jet air inlet, and the doors for the weapon bay and the landing gear, would not be visible to ground-based radar. It could just flip right-side up for landing and take-off.
The U.S. Air Force is already working on a special charged skin that makes the plane more stealthy. When you hit it with 24 volts, it becomes even more invisible to radar, and infrared heat sensors. And it also becomes harder to see, because the electricity makes it change colour, and blend in with the background.
This smaller and lighter UCAV would carry very tiny and very accurate bombs or missiles, or conducting carbon fibres which could be dropped over the enemy's electrical power grids to shut them down. Or they could carry high-powered microwave weapons, to scramble the electronics of the enemy.
One way of using these small UCAVs would be for a conventional piloted fighter to carry them into the air, and then launch a flock of them. The pilot could stay out of harm's way, while the little babies went off to war. The piloted fighter would remain electronically silent. It would not transmit, but only receive signals from the little UCAVs. Only at the last minute would it send out a brief pulse, telling them to deliver their lethal blows.
This, of course, would rely upon a secure and high density electronic link between the UCAVs and their controller. And of course, if this electronic tether was broken, the pilotless fighters would have their own internal computer systems to bring them back home. After all, the F-117 Stealth Fighter can run an entire mission from take-off to landing all by itself. If there are no complications, all the pilot has to do is press the Big Red Button - and it's "Bombs Away" and back to base for Roger Ramjet.
In September 2000, the Phantom Works Division of Boeing rolled out the X-45A. This UCAV is roughly the size of an F-16, and weighs between four and seven tonnes, depending on whether it's empty, or fully-tanked up with fuel and weapons. It's designed to have a 20-year life sitting in a sealed container, with a planned removal every five years for exercises. It's made of foam which has been covered with graphite-epoxy fabric, which was then injected with resin. That's right, that's how they make surfboards - but with the UCAVs, the wipeout can be far more devestating...
Published 15 November 2000
© 2024 Karl S. Kruszelnicki Pty Ltd
