Bye ‘Maverick’ – Air Force Preparing For AI ‘Terminator’ Jet Fighters

ANALYSIS – A long time ago, as an Air Force ROTC cadet, I was accepted to flight school after college graduation. I wanted to be a fighter pilot. 

Something changed along the way, and I decided to be a Marine jarhead instead. The Air Force didn't understand, and neither did my mom.

But I have followed aviation and fighter pilots ever since. (RELATED: Lightning From The Sky – Inside Air Force ‘Drone' Pilot Training)

And not long ago, with the advent of remotely piloted aircraft or drones, experts and pundits began predicting the end of the fighter pilot (and all pilots, for that matter).

No more Top Gun ‘Mavericks' (yes, we know he's Navy, but you get the point). (RELATED: Left Loses ‘That Loving Feeling' – Goes Ballistic Over Patriotic ‘Top Gun: Maverick')

Elon Musk has also predicted that jet fighters would soon be obsolete due to advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

Still, it has taken a long time for that prediction to come true.

An Air Force dominated by jet jockeys (fighter and bomber pilots) may be one reason the service has taken so long to accept that reality, but the time is coming.

The service still foresees a mix of piloted and unmanned aircraft for the next couple of decades. But that mix will have more drones than manned jets.

In one recent announcement, the Air Force said it wants 1,000 drones (the service calls them ‘Collaborative Combat Aircraft' or CCA) to be paired with hundreds of advanced sixth generation and F-35 stealth fighters.

Many of those drones will be remotely piloted, either from the ground or by piloted jets. (RELATED: Soldiers Testing AI Robodogs With Telepathic Commands)

And those sixth-generation fighter jets, still in the concept stage, such as the Next Generation Air Dominance (NGAD) program, are expected to have the option to fly without pilots.

But a planned test fleet of F-16 jet fighters piloted only by AI has just put that fighter pilot expiration date even closer.

This is part of an Air Force program called Project Venom — or Viper Experimentation and Next-gen Operations Model — to help it experiment with and refine AI programs loaded onto six F-16s.

And the testing just got real.

As Popular Mechanics reported:

An AI agent recently flew Lockheed Martin's VISTA X-62A for more than 17 hours at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) at Edwards Air Force Base in California—the first time AI was used on a tactical aircraft. The experimental training aircraft is expected to lay the groundwork for a coming wave of jets piloted entirely by computers.

Note – VISTA is an experimental aircraft derived from the F-16D Fighting Falcon.

While these test F-16s still had a pilot onboard, they could lay the groundwork for at least part of the 1,000 aerial ‘Terminator' fleet the Air Force envisions to be fully autonomous.

Defense News reported that Air Force Chief Scientist Victoria Coleman called Project Venom “a bridge between a fully autonomous set of capabilities and a fully manned set of capabilities, which is where we are today.”

“Self-driving cars didn't go from fully manual to fully automated,” Coleman told Defense News.

“The Tesla [vehicles] and the other electric vehicles, they've traveled millions or billions of miles where they learned and figured out how to interface with a human operator and to do so safely and securely. We don't get to skip that part in the Air Force.”

Project Venom, along with similar efforts like Skyborg, an AI-driven unmanned aircraft using an XQ-58 Valkyrie drone are moving toward the same goal – no pilots.

But, as Brig. Gen. Dale White, the service's program executive officer for fighters and advanced aircraft recently said – before the Air Force can fly CCAs into combat, pilots and other airmen need to be confident the AI operating the drones will work as expected.

Based on the ‘self-driving' Tesla example, that might take a while.

The last thing we need is heavily armed, supersonic stealth, but faulty (or rogue) ‘Terminator' jets. Maybe Maverick should stick around just a little longer.

The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the positions of American Liberty News.

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