The Vanishing Pilot

Warplanes are getting smarter too. They have sensors built right into their skin and they carry more and more competent computers, some of which understand and accept a few spoken commands, even when the pilot is under stress. Target-finding computers can pick out potential attack points hundreds of kilometers away at night and in bad weather. Still more computers track and relay target information to yet other computers that order the plane's missiles and guns to seek and destroy the targets. Other computers manage fuel consumption, check for hostile radar, continuously manipulate the warplane's numerous control surfaces for best flying, and plan the shortest and safest flight path.

Yet the present generation of fighter planes is not as good as it can be because pilots are fragile. Carrying a pilot today is like going to war with eggs in your pocket. Turns have to be wider and dives and climbs shallower than they could be. No such limits apply to the robotic antiaircraft missiles trying to blow the plane out of the sky. Further, during a dogfight, warplanes could be closing at over Mach 4---upwards of one and a half kilometers a second. With today's air-to-air missile range of around fifty kilometers, two pilots who detect each other from sixty-five kilometers away have less than ten seconds to decide what to do. And what's an eyeblink to us can be an eternity to a computer.

There's another reason we're vanishing from warplanes: We cost too much. It takes between five and ten million dollars to train a pilot. And the costs of a human crew add another one to five million dollars for extra space and weight (oxygen, extra fuel, seats, parachutes, and so on). In addition, warplanes are bigger, slower, heavier, and clumsier because of their human cargo. Having to carry a crew decreases an aircraft's weapons load and maneuverability, expands fuel needs and cost, reduces its range and speed, and vastly increases the human and political costs of losing even one. For all these reasons, pilots and weapons officers in today's advanced warplanes are an endangered species. They're on their way out, shouldered aside by lighter, cheaper, faster, more expendable, and more rugged silicon soldiers.

In the 1940s, heavy bombers needed a crew of twelve; by the 1950s, that dropped to six; by the 1970s, it was four; and by the 1980s, only two. In the decades to come, there will be one, and then---like cruise missiles---none.

To keep pilots in warplanes, we might eventually have to encase them in body-fitting padded coffins to compensate for high-stress maneuvers. Then, to jump up their reaction time, we might have to give them drugs or a direct brain-to-plane connection, or both. We would also have to bear the enormous costs of those sophisticated planes and their ever more stressed pilots. Even then, as the decades pass and ever better and cheaper computers continually improve antiaircraft sensors and weapons, the demands of the cockpit will eventually grow beyond the limits of human adaptability. Computers will push pilots right out of the plane.

The days of the First World War flying ace armed only with a cigarette, a debonair smile, and a plucky biplane made of canvas and wire are gone forever. The ever-increasing numbers of smart missiles and drone aircraft are pushing us kicking and screaming into our future. Soon we won't be fast enough, cheap enough, or rugged enough to stay in the cockpit. Machines are taking over. They have more of the right stuff.

The Last Boys' Cluib