Also, I’d be pretty interested to see what Antonov pivots into in the coming decade or two
Given Ukraine’s domestic success with building and operating drones for warfare, I hope Antonov skips human piloted fighter/bomber aircraft altogether. Its a dead end technology. Ukraine is wise buying European domestically produced aircraft which gives them nations with a vested interest in Ukraine’s success over the long term against China’s future vassal state of the Russian Frontier.
I’m saying other already have fully developed crewed fighter/bomber/interceptor aircraft. Simply buy those. If Ukraine is developing domestic aircraft for those roles, uncrewed version are unserved/underserved market. Ukraine has unique knowledge for drones. They could become the creator/exporter for that technology to other nations instead of pouring lots of effort into duplicating crewed fighters that other nations already build well they could buy from instead.
That makes sense I just wonder how much wisdom there is to building an entirely new unmanned fighter-bomber “wingman” from the ground up when there are fly-by-wire manned fighter-bomber jets with a deep established database of flight data that could be repurposed to be unmanned capable, at least for routine air patrol missions carrying air defense missiles and such. The big problem for Ukraine is that in needs a TONNN of pilots so the large procurement of Rafales and Eurofighters in a sense would be a pipe dream for now even in they were all delivered tomorrow… so why not try to structure the procurement of manned jets so that at least a portion of them can be made unmanned capable and thus can fill out an air defense network even before Ukraine has the larger number of human pilots they are planning for? This would make it easier for Ukraine to obscure how many human pilots it is actually fielding at any one point and where they are concentrated and would play to the immediate interests of the nations and arms companies Ukraine is procuring these manned jets from.
This is already being done with helicopters both by militaries and defense companies, for example for the US it makes far more sense to develop the blackhawk into an optionally unmanned platform than it does to develop a new equivalent capability medium lift utility unmanned helicopter from the ground up. I would think if anything this would be easier to do with fighter jets so long as they were flying fairly simple and safe missions and routes. Yes I suppose that means you are probably going to be using mostly used equipment but I would argue the volumes of flight data from decades of flying established manned aircraft platforms is extremely relevant to the development of unmanned platform in a way that an aircraft designed from the ground up can’t rival.
I think you make a great point about the wisdom of developing an umanned wingman drone domestically to accompany manned fighter-bombers, I just think Ukraine should start doing that with F-16s and Mirage 2000-5Fs for its very high performance aircraft before they try to start building them from scratch. I know this approach isn’t all the rage and hype right now, but I think that is actually kind of foolish of militaries if they aren’t quietly investing in this capability. Who cares if the unmanned jet is perfectly optimized to have no cockpit and designed from scratch for unmanned flight when you can take a F-16 and know pretty much everything you could want to know about the aircraft’s performance from the get go when you started designing autonomous flight capability for it? The advantages of humans having blazed the path forward flying countless hours on F-16s seem to me to far outweigh the disadvantages of having to work around a cockpit designed for a human. Same goes for the Mirage 2000-5F, Rafale and Eurofighter jets. We call it Big Data for a reason!
I’m not an aerospace engineer, but I would guess that lots of compromises are built into today’s crewed fighter aircraft as compromises for the human body inside it. This can be as simple as extra armor around the fuselage to protect the pilot from flak, but this armor is heavy subtracting from the range and agility of the aircraft.
I’m also betting that lots of limits are placed upon the design of the aircraft around the 9Gs-10Gs a human body could take for a very short amount of time. Think of the agility and turn radius of an aircraft that could take 12G to 18G maneuvers in the course of a regular day when the design of the aircraft removes the limits of a human body needs to survive.
Lastly the airframe itself is larger than needed for uncrewed if you’re able to subtract the cockpit, canopy, ejection seat systems, environmental system that keep a pilot able to breath and from freezing to death or roasting alive. All of that removed weight means either more weight for weapons payload, longer range from more available fuel, or a smaller aircraft that is cheaper to build, store, and deploy.
Antonov could be the company that skips all the human pilot stuff and putting all that energy and effort into building a superior aircraft without the human pilot limitations.
I’m not an aerospace engineer, but I would guess that lots of compromises are built into today’s crewed fighter aircraft as compromises for the human body inside it. This can be as simple as extra armor around the fuselage to protect the pilot from flak, but this armor is heavy subtracting from the range and agility of the aircraft.
I’m also betting that lots of limits are placed upon the design of the aircraft around the 9Gs-10Gs a human body could take for a very short amount of time. Think of the agility and turn radius of an aircraft that could take 12G to 18G maneuvers in the course of a regular day when the design of the aircraft removes the limits of a human body needs to survive.
Vulnerable electronics such as electronics warfare and surveillance equipment can be placed to exploit that protection around the cockpit. You could potentially place high value electronics equipment critical for a mission in the seat of the aircraft and eject it as you would a pilot as well. This kind of capability could also be useful for gaining intel on what caused a crash/the fighter-bomber to be shot down in the event it was.
I am not suggesting waves of AI Ukrainian F-16s and Mirages dogfighting in complex engagements, and even in that case at this point most of what accounts for success in aerial combat is operational planning, intelligence, and missiles. So what if an aerial platform isn’t designed to turn at the absolute limit because it was only designed for the measly capabilities of humans? The mission parameters I am suggesting are aerial patrols in friendly territory as part of a pack hunting down flying bombs either as an additional missile launch platform for a nearby manned fighter or as simply a mobile radar and targeting assistant to said manned fighter.
Lastly the airframe itself is larger than needed for uncrewed if you’re able to subtract the cockpit, canopy, ejection seat systems, environmental system that keep a pilot able to breath and from freezing to death or roasting alive. All of that removed weight means either more weight for weapons payload, longer range from more available fuel, or a smaller aircraft that is cheaper to build, store, and deploy.
I understand this perspective, but something that is really easy to forget about modern day fighter aircraft is that they are often called fighter-bombers because they truly are bombers. These aircraft can carry thousands of pounds of munitions and equipment, any equivalent unmanned platform is going to still be quite a large, complex heavy aircraft and if anything stripping all of that stuff out of an unmanned adaption of a manned fighter-bomber would only increase the performance of the aircraft. People make the same mistake with utility and attack helicopters, independent of whether they are manned or not, you have to see them from the context of how much payload they can lift, how far and how fast and what that can do for you that a smaller aircraft unmanned or not simply can’t do because of physics.
You are definitely right, there will be types of smaller air superiority highly maneuverable unmanned fighter aircraft designed to do things that a human could never survive, but this isn’t what Ukraine needs. Ukraine needs flying radar, targeting and missile launch platforms with high speed and range and the solution I am proposing also helps protect Ukraine’s living breathing fighter-bomber pilots better because it is far more difficult to identify who is a robot and who is the master controlling the robots when they are all the same kind of airplane.
Tbh I just don’t think that’s true. I think the balance will shift HEAVILY towards unmanned, but I think manned platforms still have a place now, and will continue to.
Given Ukraine’s domestic success with building and operating drones for warfare, I hope Antonov skips human piloted fighter/bomber aircraft altogether. Its a dead end technology. Ukraine is wise buying European domestically produced aircraft which gives them nations with a vested interest in Ukraine’s success over the long term against China’s future vassal state of the Russian Frontier.
I don’t agree primarily because who says you have to only have one or the other in an aircraft?
I’m saying other already have fully developed crewed fighter/bomber/interceptor aircraft. Simply buy those. If Ukraine is developing domestic aircraft for those roles, uncrewed version are unserved/underserved market. Ukraine has unique knowledge for drones. They could become the creator/exporter for that technology to other nations instead of pouring lots of effort into duplicating crewed fighters that other nations already build well they could buy from instead.
That makes sense I just wonder how much wisdom there is to building an entirely new unmanned fighter-bomber “wingman” from the ground up when there are fly-by-wire manned fighter-bomber jets with a deep established database of flight data that could be repurposed to be unmanned capable, at least for routine air patrol missions carrying air defense missiles and such. The big problem for Ukraine is that in needs a TONNN of pilots so the large procurement of Rafales and Eurofighters in a sense would be a pipe dream for now even in they were all delivered tomorrow… so why not try to structure the procurement of manned jets so that at least a portion of them can be made unmanned capable and thus can fill out an air defense network even before Ukraine has the larger number of human pilots they are planning for? This would make it easier for Ukraine to obscure how many human pilots it is actually fielding at any one point and where they are concentrated and would play to the immediate interests of the nations and arms companies Ukraine is procuring these manned jets from.
This is already being done with helicopters both by militaries and defense companies, for example for the US it makes far more sense to develop the blackhawk into an optionally unmanned platform than it does to develop a new equivalent capability medium lift utility unmanned helicopter from the ground up. I would think if anything this would be easier to do with fighter jets so long as they were flying fairly simple and safe missions and routes. Yes I suppose that means you are probably going to be using mostly used equipment but I would argue the volumes of flight data from decades of flying established manned aircraft platforms is extremely relevant to the development of unmanned platform in a way that an aircraft designed from the ground up can’t rival.
I think you make a great point about the wisdom of developing an umanned wingman drone domestically to accompany manned fighter-bombers, I just think Ukraine should start doing that with F-16s and Mirage 2000-5Fs for its very high performance aircraft before they try to start building them from scratch. I know this approach isn’t all the rage and hype right now, but I think that is actually kind of foolish of militaries if they aren’t quietly investing in this capability. Who cares if the unmanned jet is perfectly optimized to have no cockpit and designed from scratch for unmanned flight when you can take a F-16 and know pretty much everything you could want to know about the aircraft’s performance from the get go when you started designing autonomous flight capability for it? The advantages of humans having blazed the path forward flying countless hours on F-16s seem to me to far outweigh the disadvantages of having to work around a cockpit designed for a human. Same goes for the Mirage 2000-5F, Rafale and Eurofighter jets. We call it Big Data for a reason!
I’m not an aerospace engineer, but I would guess that lots of compromises are built into today’s crewed fighter aircraft as compromises for the human body inside it. This can be as simple as extra armor around the fuselage to protect the pilot from flak, but this armor is heavy subtracting from the range and agility of the aircraft.
I’m also betting that lots of limits are placed upon the design of the aircraft around the 9Gs-10Gs a human body could take for a very short amount of time. Think of the agility and turn radius of an aircraft that could take 12G to 18G maneuvers in the course of a regular day when the design of the aircraft removes the limits of a human body needs to survive.
Lastly the airframe itself is larger than needed for uncrewed if you’re able to subtract the cockpit, canopy, ejection seat systems, environmental system that keep a pilot able to breath and from freezing to death or roasting alive. All of that removed weight means either more weight for weapons payload, longer range from more available fuel, or a smaller aircraft that is cheaper to build, store, and deploy.
Antonov could be the company that skips all the human pilot stuff and putting all that energy and effort into building a superior aircraft without the human pilot limitations.
Vulnerable electronics such as electronics warfare and surveillance equipment can be placed to exploit that protection around the cockpit. You could potentially place high value electronics equipment critical for a mission in the seat of the aircraft and eject it as you would a pilot as well. This kind of capability could also be useful for gaining intel on what caused a crash/the fighter-bomber to be shot down in the event it was.
I am not suggesting waves of AI Ukrainian F-16s and Mirages dogfighting in complex engagements, and even in that case at this point most of what accounts for success in aerial combat is operational planning, intelligence, and missiles. So what if an aerial platform isn’t designed to turn at the absolute limit because it was only designed for the measly capabilities of humans? The mission parameters I am suggesting are aerial patrols in friendly territory as part of a pack hunting down flying bombs either as an additional missile launch platform for a nearby manned fighter or as simply a mobile radar and targeting assistant to said manned fighter.
I understand this perspective, but something that is really easy to forget about modern day fighter aircraft is that they are often called fighter-bombers because they truly are bombers. These aircraft can carry thousands of pounds of munitions and equipment, any equivalent unmanned platform is going to still be quite a large, complex heavy aircraft and if anything stripping all of that stuff out of an unmanned adaption of a manned fighter-bomber would only increase the performance of the aircraft. People make the same mistake with utility and attack helicopters, independent of whether they are manned or not, you have to see them from the context of how much payload they can lift, how far and how fast and what that can do for you that a smaller aircraft unmanned or not simply can’t do because of physics.
You are definitely right, there will be types of smaller air superiority highly maneuverable unmanned fighter aircraft designed to do things that a human could never survive, but this isn’t what Ukraine needs. Ukraine needs flying radar, targeting and missile launch platforms with high speed and range and the solution I am proposing also helps protect Ukraine’s living breathing fighter-bomber pilots better because it is far more difficult to identify who is a robot and who is the master controlling the robots when they are all the same kind of airplane.
Tbh I just don’t think that’s true. I think the balance will shift HEAVILY towards unmanned, but I think manned platforms still have a place now, and will continue to.
Sure, but Ukraine could simply buy those crewed aircraft that already exist today instead of reinventing the wheel.