USAF/USN 6th Gen Fighters - F/A-XX, F-X, NGAD, PCA, ASFS News & Analysis [2008- 2025]

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GTX said:
https://www.twz.com/air/collaborative-combat-aircraft-poised-to-reshape-the-air-force
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So Increment 1 is looking at ~$25mil per CCA.


TomS said:
USAF is around 2000 pilots short as of 2023. The training pipeline is coming a little short of targets (by a couple hundred people) mainly because the T-38 force is too broke to fly the necessary training sorties. But the real killer is retention. Airlines pay better and get you home on a regular schedule.

https://www.airandspaceforces.com/a... Air Force's goal,for the last several years.
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And airlines aren't hiring many fighter pilots anymore. They're directly hiring tanker and transport pilots, especially when they have hours in 737s or 767s that can transfer over.

But let's be honest here. By the time a pilot has 8 years in and has completed the initial service obligation, they're an O3 getting looked at for O4. And once you hit O4, you stop flying planes and start flying desks. So everyone who joined the USAF to be a pilot is going to be looking at leaving once they don't get paid to fly anymore.
 
Scott Kenny said:
So Increment 1 is looking at ~$25mil per CCA.



And airlines aren't hiring many fighter pilots anymore. They're directly hiring tanker and transport pilots, especially when they have hours in 737s or 767s that can transfer over.

But let's be honest here. By the time a pilot has 8 years in and has completed the initial service obligation, they're an O3 getting looked at for O4. And once you hit O4, you stop flying planes and start flying desks. So everyone who joined the USAF to be a pilot is going to be looking at leaving once they don't get paid to fly anymore.
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Going forward planes are probably going to be pilot optional, especially with strong AI. I don’t think it is as far fetched as it once seemed at this point.
 
I think that pilot optional planes will start to come true in the 6.5 generation then be reality in the 7th generation especially with AI control so this could mean that we are starting to see the end of the line of actual fighter pilots which will be a good thing in the long run.
 
siegecrossbow said:
Going forward planes are probably going to be pilot optional, especially with strong AI. I don’t think it is as far fetched as it once seemed at this point.
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I don't think that's going to happen as fast as the pundits are claiming.

I mean, general/strong AI has been "10-20 years away" since the 1970s, and we're still not there yet despite all the work that has been put into it.

My best bet is that pilot-optional aircraft won't happen before the 7th generation of jets. Late 2080s or maybe even 2100.
 
Scott Kenny said:
I don't think that's going to happen as fast as the pundits are claiming.

I mean, general/strong AI has been "10-20 years away" since the 1970s, and we're still not there yet despite all the work that has been put into it.

My best bet is that pilot-optional aircraft won't happen before the 7th generation of jets. Late 2080s or maybe even 2100.
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You are being too pessimistic. We do not need strong enough of an AI to do everything a human being does. It just needs to be trained on dataset for fighter pilot specific tasks.
 
siegecrossbow said:
You are being too pessimistic. We do not need strong enough of an AI to do everything a human being does. It just needs to be trained on dataset for fighter pilot specific tasks.
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Right.

And I think that will take until the 7th generation combat aircraft arrive to get that level of AI.

I hope to be proven wrong, but I expect it to take that long.
 
Given the pronounced development in large data models recently, I think by end of decade we’ll see CCAs operating completely independently within limited circumstances/areas. I think it simply won’t be challenging to identify targets and respond to them as a group. How difficult is it to recognize a target as hostile, or at least not friendly, and fire a couple AAMs into it? When it comes to air combat maneuvering, AI has already bested pilots. And the advantages of expendable aircraft who don’t need pilots is going to be too tempting not to use.
 
Josh_TN said:
Given the pronounced development in large data models recently, I think by end of decade we’ll see CCAs operating completely independently within limited circumstances/areas. I think it simply won’t be challenging to identify targets and respond to them as a group. How difficult is it to recognize a target as hostile, or at least not friendly, and fire a couple AAMs into it? When it comes to air combat maneuvering, AI has already bested pilots. And the advantages of expendable aircraft who don’t need pilots is going to be too tempting not to use.
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Air targets yes, ground targets no.
 
Josh_TN said:
There are already munitions that autonomously ID and engage ground targets. Outside geofencing them, I don’t see why they couldn’t engage ground targets.
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Yeah, you might not want to use them for CAS, but I can totally see AI driven CCAs doing work on behind the lines targets.
 
My first take is that OBSS carries a radar and more fuel, with control surfaces optimized for low speed, higher endurance, and that OBWS is a pair of BVR AAMs and no radar (IRST?) with more swept wings of thinner cord, narrow nose, and lighter fuel load.

I would also wager that increment 1 CCA is more of the later type, with the manned component fulfilling the sensor role until later iterations.
 
So, the XQ-67 is basically the CCA9?

CCA9 - ISR and Comms for mission type.
LO (as opposed to VLO)
1000nmi range
Synthetic Aperture Radar and maybe EO eyeball.
Takeoff from roads or runways
 
Scott Kenny said:
So, the XQ-67 is basically the CCA9?

CCA9 - ISR and Comms for mission type.
LO (as opposed to VLO)
1000nmi range
Synthetic Aperture Radar and maybe EO eyeball.
Takeoff from roads or runways
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I would not assume the Mitchell exercise’s notional CCAs have any relationship with real aircraft.
 
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I wonder at what point the manned fighter will be fully phased out as each generation of UCAVs progresses? Could the 6th be the last?
 
Somehow I do not think that the 6th generation will be the last truly manned fighter we would quite possibly have to wait until the 7th generation for that to happen.
 
In_A_Dream said:
I wonder at what point the manned fighter will be fully phased out as each generation of UCAVs progresses? Could the 6th be the last?
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Definitely...though I would argue that the current 5th Gen should be.
 
Josh_TN said:
I would not assume the Mitchell exercise’s notional CCAs have any relationship with real aircraft.
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They seem to have come from proposed or flying drones, though.

There are several different drones that can meet each of the low end requirements.



In_A_Dream said:
I wonder at what point the manned fighter will be fully phased out as each generation of UCAVs progresses? Could the 6th be the last?
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Depends on how quickly the AI pilots develop to the level where you could have a single manned plane leading an entire strike package of CCAs (that may end up being the definition of 7th generation fighters, so no human pilots would then be 8th generation).
 
That was exactly what I was thinking when I first saw the design pedrospe. :cool:
 
Circling back to the OBSS/OBWS discussion, something I did not realize about the Gambit platform is that the engine is not actually part of the core components. GA specifically states that a more fuel efficient engine can be used for the Gambit 1 configuration. So the performance differences between the weapon station and sensor station could be quite dramatic, given not just different control surface and forward fuselage arrangements but different power installations as well. I guess with fly by wire and computer modeling, having very different engine masses and outputs is not a major problem?
 
WRT OBSS, no one seems to have mentioned the possibility of using it for bistatic radar. OBSS as the active source, manned platforms receiving silently. At a minimum it will give you bearing and possibly range-rate. With two transmitters, or two cooperating receivers, or a transmitter with a known location, triangulation should be possible.
 
Josh_TN said:
I guess with fly by wire and computer modeling, having very different engine masses and outputs is not a major problem?
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It's no different to different fuel states and throttling the engine back and forth. The major issue would be if you significantly changed the aircraft's centre of gravity, in which case it's an aerodynamics question as much as a flight-control laws one. But if the wings are as changeable as the engines then you would just need a a matched wing-engine pair.

It's been done before, the Eurofighter prototypes were set-up to use RB199 or EJ200 on the assumption the airframes would be ready before the engine, but then Volker Ruehe single-handedly delayed the airframe, letting the engines catch up, so in the event only DA1 and DA2 flew with RB199.

And because EJ200 was built with the same attachment points as RB199 there was some thought to putting it in Tornado.
 
A shape render from the patch, looks neat, Mach angle appears to be 2.2
 

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