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Air systems Pilot programme
AI has already demonstrated the ability to overcome human pilots in training scenarios – and air forces around the world have increasingly been looking into ways in which AI can be included in their operations. Andrea Valentino talks to Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the defence programme at the Center for a New American Security, and to a spokesperson from the US Air Force, on whether we can expect to see AI pilots become the norm in the coming years, as well as explore the technical and practical challenges to successful implementation.
he First World War was never a conflict really marked by chivalry. How could it be? Between the mortars, the rats and the hopeless charges against enemy wire, this quintessentially modern struggle soon put paid to any lingering hopes Europeans might have had that killing could be honourable. At least, this is almost true. For while the Tommys were being butchered in the fields, their allies in the air did perhaps recall the romance of pre-modern battle. Evocatively known as the ‘knights of the sky’, early fighter pilots still relied on
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talent and pluck to defeat their foes, even as the nature of the fight meant they avoided the grubby reality of life in the trenches. “The heavens are their battlefield,” is how David Lloyd George, then-prime minister of the UK, vividly put it in 1917. “They are the Cavalry of the Clouds.”
Much has changed, of course, since the sepia- tinged days of wobbly biplanes – and it would be wrong to overly glamorise a profession still ultimately based on death. Even so, the intervening century has seen fighter pilots broadly retain the reputation they
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Defence & Security Systems International /
www.defence-and-security.com
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