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Politics : American Presidential Politics and foreign affairs -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (36072)	7/28/2009 4:55:39 PM
From: Jim S	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71588

I've had many discussions along these same lines. What it all boils down to is that fighter pilots want to be in a real cockpit, and they can really get off on seeing a stream of tracers in front of them. In a high performance fighter, the pilot damn sure better be strapped in tight. As such, he has a 180* lateral view, and about 60* up. Not a whole lot different than a sports car with bucket seats. A pilot's rear view mirror is small, and only helps for things pretty close on his six. What a pilot relies on are on his instrument panel or heads up display. His eyeballs are useless for the 60-70% of his close in environment that he can't see, and for anything beyond about five or six miles away from him. A UAV can "see" well beyond those limitations. In addition, a UAV would have access to a considerable amount of information external to itself that a pilot with time on his hands could use, but when the "pucker factor" goes up and a human pilot gets too busy to pay attention, the computer in a UAV would consider in its activities. So, I contend that a UAV would have superior situational awareness. I don't want to get into some of the things that an A2A vehicle would have access to, but that could easily lead to sensory overload for a human pilot. Suffice it to say that the AWACS is a pretty capable machine, and it flies well beyond the reach of any enemy fighters. And, just a quick comment on missile g-loading: long skinny tubes filled with brittle propellants don't deal well with lateral stresses. Like a broomstick, they are easy to crack or bend with a sideways strain. A high-g turn won't result in a missile launch 100% of the time, of course. But it sure give the advantage to getting a firing solution over an opponent that can't pull those same Gs.