The next gen. of planes.

[Sel94]

What do you guys think the future will be for planes? I think the F-22 will be the last manned fighter because it is nearly a perfect fighter. I believe UAVs will be created to replace military attack planes because nobody in your army gets killed. With new technology, I'm sure this will happen for better or worse.

[Antartis]

I do not believe that will be last manned fighting F-22. Still it is very early. Personally I do not believe that it will become before 2050.

 

As the new fighter of the USN boeing sixth generation say.

[Frederf]

UAVs are brilliant from a technical standpoint. Human habitability requirements are zero which improves performance, endurance, aerodynamics, cost, development time, and reduces the loss of pilots.

[Pilotasso]

Fighters will be harder and harder to develop and less and less needed. At some point late this century most countries simply will drop the traditional fighter as a weapons systems out for costs and low probability of high intensity conflicts. UCAV's will be there but not to fill the same taks Im sure. which is actualy a good thing, if we can divert that money for better things. :)

[davek1979]

And I predict the rise of disposable OR directional EMP charges that will blow those UAVs off the skies.

 

Pilotasso: what better things ? :-) Mankind can't divert to better things mate. I'm pretty sure the money will be used to create anti-UAV measures, which will trigger creation of anti-anti-UAV measures and so on ad infinitum. We will never learn.

[636_Castle]

I was at an airshow a few weeks ago where a B-2 was making passes. The announcer was talking about the oolldddd technology of the B-2. It really does make you wonder what they're testing out there for the next generation. I'm seeing new propulsion methods on the horizon, and wayyyy more stealth.

 

Check out this US Navy concept for a year 2025 fighter:

 

 

And of course the unmanned X-47B which has plans to begin engine and taxi tests within a year from now:

 

 

The idea of unmanned combat is ridiculous to me. Yes it keeps your county's army safer, but so does avoiding war completely. If you're going to impose your reason for war, at least be bold enough to fight for victory.

[Wolf Rider]

more and more unmanned planes controlled by simmers in a protected bunker, until air superiority is achieved... send in the stand off weapons (cruise missiles) first

[SAM77]

I'm pretty sure the money will be used to create anti-UAV measures, which will trigger creation of anti-anti-UAV measures and so on ad infinitum. We will never learn.

 

:thumbup:

Agree totally.

[Grimes]

UAVs acting in a strike capacity will long be the norm before you start to see a proper UAV air superiority fighter. Thats not to say we won't see a UAV armed with AMRAAMs in the skies, but it would be merely a support role assisting manned fighters like the F-22.

[pauldy]

 

Check out this US Navy concept for a year 2025 fighter:

 

 

And of course the unmanned X-47B which has plans to begin engine and taxi tests within a year from now:

 

 

Is this a so called 6th Generation Fighter?

[KungFuCharlie]

All of you should read a book called Cyber Warfare by Richard Clarke. You don't need the most stealthiest aircraft or top notch avionics to successfully carry out kinetic military operations.

 

For example: In September 2007 Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear facility that was being built by North Koreans. They used F-15 and F-16 aircraft and the Syrian air defenses never even saw them. The reason is because Israeli cyber warriors owned the Russian made Syrian air defense network (i.e. got control of the system remotely by exploiting a security vulnerability in the network) the day before the attack and on the night of the attack they simply replaced the real data coming from the defense sensors with data they recorded the night before where there were no airplanes in the airspace over Syria. The Syrian defense operators had no clue this had even happened. This allowed the Israeli aircraft to infiltrate the airspace, drop bombs on target, and return home without any significant threat from the Syrian air defense network.

 

I know this isn't directly related to the topic of next generation of planes but I think that the answer to the topic has a lot to do with the topic of cyber warfare. If you can control the enemies air defenses then you don't really need high-tech aircraft.

 

Personally, I think that in the near future we will see a lot more UAV recon and bomber aircraft but fighter aircraft will continue to be manned. Eventually we will see UAV fighters but technology just isn't good enough yet for a pilot to get the type of SA to win in a dogfight while flying remotely. That doesn't mean we won't see BVR based UAV's in the near future...

 

As for UAV's... sure, you don't put a pilot in harms way but there are other significant issues that must be addressed. The enemy using them to their advantage similar to how insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan could monitor the unencrypted video downlink of Predator drones comes to mind. A more technology advanced enemy might even be able to take control of a drone or jam its uplink and downlink making it useless to the operators. You also have to consider the political issues with UAV's... when the Predator first came out politicians in Washington tried to get themselves put into the military decision making loop since they could get intel in real time from the battlefield. Luckily the military has been able to prevent that from happening too often. You also have to consider the strikes that kill civilians... do you blame the operator, the intelligence analyst, or blame it on faulty equipment? These are all things that will factor in with what we will see for future aircraft.

 

I will end my long semi-off-topic post with a quote from a VP of Lockheed Martin that was one of the top dogs at Skunk Works back in the day. I cannot remember the exact words but they were very similar to this...

 

"At any given moment the US military is operating technology that is 50 years more advanced than what the public currently knows about."

 

50 years more advanced... Can you even image that? Of course that doesn't mean a complete aircraft with 50 years advanced technology... that could mean just one component of an aircraft is that advanced. So really you may need to be discussing what the 6th public generation aircraft is. :)

[Shaman]

What's the point of having planes when they will be all shot down or their electronic equipment rendered useless with single beam of ground based energy weapon of some sort. BAM! Make love not war!

[Pilotasso]

Actually the beam weapons previously shown in public that you are probably referring to have been considered obsolete, unpractical for the battle field and for tests purposes only.

 

There are huge problems associated with energy generation, storage not to mention the dimensions of the battery. You might as well keep using missiles whose increasing accuracy and range renders lasers in the forseable future redundant anyway.

[KungFuCharlie]

Another problem with lasers is blooming... that is why we don't have space based laser systems that can fry something from space. Getting the beam to stay focused enough to have any real effect is pretty much impossible at the technology level we have now.

 

There have been some recent stories about Raytheon having a successful test of a ship based laser system but even still a practical solution that can be deployed to the fleet is still well into the future.

 

Oh, and in my longer post above I forgot to say in favor of UAV's in a dogfight situation that the G-limit would be a lot higher since there isn't any wetware sitting in the seat. :)

[IronsightSniper]

Certainly unmanned planes will be the future, UCAV not so recently began making a larger presence and notoriety, all they need now is to go faster, and learn to do barrel rolls and manned planes would be obsolete.

[-Bazong-]

.........

A more technology advanced enemy might even be able to take control of a drone or jam its uplink and downlink making it useless to the operators.

.........

 

So there will have to be an AI in them perhaps, scary stuff that.

 

However if ED gets in that business we might be getting very good AI in DCS:[whichever fighter comes first] :P

[KungFuCharlie]

So there will have to be an AI in them perhaps, scary stuff that.

 

However if ED gets in that business we might be getting very good AI in DCS:[whichever fighter comes first] :P

 

There is already AI in UAV's and in the next few years there will be a whole lot more. Sierra Nevada Corporation has a few big contracts in this area. I did some software AI research and prototyping for them at the last company I worked at. I was going to write a white paper on some of the topics for IT/SEC but switched jobs a little while ago and not in that area any longer.

 

There isn't much information on their website about it at all but this is the division doing most of it: http://www.sncorp.com/prod/isr/default.shtml