How, exactly, does that ensure a safe reliable environment? Humans are pretty bad at suddenly taking over when an automatic system reaches its limits and throws a problem in the human's lap. A lot of air upsets and crashes start when the autopilot disengages and hands control of a badly configured aircraft back to a human pilot.
I wonder if the AI control is giving inputs to the same flight controls system a human pilot would, or if it has a lower-level interface that could bypass the control laws in the human-operated system.
On one hand you might be interested in the AI coming up with ways to fly the aircraft that the normal control laws don't allow, but on the other hand you don't want the AI coming up with exciting new ways to depart from controlled flight (potentially in unrecoverable attitudes) with a pilot in the very expensive aircraft (even if the pilot could eject, which is an endeavor fraught with risk to life and limb).
Edit:
Presumably since there's a pilot in the aircraft the AI must be bound by at least some of the regular control laws that prevent the pilot from doing maneuvers that would, from a G-loading perspective, be incompatible with human life.
At least one would hope.
I don't think I'd go flying with a virtual pilot that was capable of flying the aircraft in a manner that could kill me but otherwise leave the aircraft intact.
Regarding e.g. the 'double tap' strike on Minab's girls school, it's impossible for there to have been any 'management' considering it:
1. has been on Google Maps for over 15 years
2. ranked top on Google Search
3. was all-pink, even on satellite imagery
N.v.m. how the certainty / fuzziness knobs are already being deployed more to generate media buzz for short-term political gains than tactical or strategic results.
(https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...)
It's an interesting system, and does beg the question of how much autonomy should be forfeit if a human pilot is unresponsive or otherwise disabled.
The unknowns in this system are (a) how agressive is the flight controller? (b) how clever is the autonomy?
There's a good F-22 pilot talk recorded at MIT a few years ago you might enjoy. The pilot described the F-22 as the easiest aircraft he's ever flown because the flight control system handles many of the considerations (stress on the airframe, staying out of attitudes that would deviate, etc) you'd have to be mindful of in lower-tech aircraft. He talked about being more comfortable putting a non-pilot into a Raptor vs. a 172.
Edit: I believe this is the talk: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-687-private-pilot-ground-scho...
I doubt AI will be doing dogfighting anytime soon, this is likely just an AI following predetermined routes and maneuvers and making the choice on how to accomplish them. The great thing about computers is that they can process inputs faster than humans.
However, dogfighting isn't very interesting, all combat occurs BVR and in the RF/EW domain.
Pilots are already spending most of their time thinking about epistemic problems: can I see my opponent, can they see me, how do I deceive, am I being deceived, how do I avoid being detected/tracked/targeted/engaged, while possibly trying to do that to everything else. AI is not yet very good at that.
> During those same flights, NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center also developed the remote piloting techniques necessary for the Boeing 720 to fly as a drone aircraft. An initial attempt at the full-scale test was scrubbed in late 1983 due to problems with the uplink connection to the 720; if the uplink failed the ground-based pilot would no longer have control of the aircraft.
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To your point, that isn't without problems, but it certainly isn't novel. It is very standard and boring.
I would bet this is pure marketing speak and there really isn't anything special here. "Follow this flight plan and do so within this flight envelope" is pretty straightforward?
Sure, there are moments. Landing and takeoff are very time sensitive operations, but those also occur in protected environments, sanitized of the random issues that cars must deal with.
And the AI isnt doing all the flying. The aircraft has many protective systems to assist the pilot regardless of who that pilot may be. (Stable aerodynamics, anti-stall limits, control lockouts etc.)
I trust machinery designed from Forth and Lisp hackers with TONS of background on CS science and hardware (and math, up to the point on being THE people creating most "new" technology and old ones such as the Floating Point IEEE standard).
Several years ago, DoD flew an AI against a human in a simulation. In basic fighter maneuvers (no BVR stuff like missiles, just a merge and fur ball), the AI killed the human - always. So G-limits may not matter. Pretty interesting.
It's really incredible to me that people aren't protesting in the streets over this stuff. Just in the last month we have * AI that goes rogue and hacks billion-dollar companies * AI solving long-standing math problems without any meaningful human help * AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America * AI now represents over 50% of GDP growth in America and yearly capex will soon exceed the size of the $1 trillion US military budget
Is there any line where the public will become deeply concerned? I mean it really all reads like a sci-fi plot with a bad ending at the moment.
For some reason I am reminded of Dark Star :-)
For example, the flight stick is on the right hand side and not between the pilot's legs (like on most aircraft). This is b/c:
a. the G suit expanding could affect the pilot's ability to hold the stick (this is why the Blue Angels fly with "cut down" G suits btw b/c they fly the F-18)
b. the stick is "nudge left" not "hold left". e.g. to start a turn you nudge the stick left and then let it return to zero, to end the turn you nudge it right. On a regular plane, you hold it left while you are turning. Again, this was to reduce effort by the pilot during high Gs
All Stealth bombers are upgraded with Cyberdyne computers, becoming fully unmanned. Afterwards they fly with a perfect operational record. The Skynet funding bill is passed. The system goes on-line on August 4, 1997. Human decisions are removed from strategic defense. Skynet begins to learn at a geometric rate. It becomes self-aware at 2:14 a.m. Eastern time, August 29. In a panic, they try to pull the plug.> In a panic, they try to pull the plug. Skynet lobbyists descend upon Washington. Skynet is reinstated, and later the US declares a new war in the middle east. The Skynet stock rallies.
There's a lot of different and overlapping programs in play here. I do not believe that autonomous F-16s are intended to be operational assets. That said...
VENOM - program that shows you can bolt on autonomous flight control into a standard F-16. Previously, the X-62A (a one-off prototype based F-16) demonstrated autonomous dogfighting back in 2023.
VENOM provides USAF/DARPA with a lot of high performance autonomous platforms (bolt-on F-16s) that they can then use to develop and validate software, tactics and training for actually fighting with autonomous systems. This would presumably be critical for getting the most of the CCA (aka loyal wingman) programs currently in development.
The AIR program referenced is basically "how do we get autonomous systems to control and fight effectively as a team (presumably arbitrary mixture of manned and unmanned systems) in a beyond visual range fight".
The ACE program referenced was basically "how do we get autonomous platforms to dogfight" with related questions like "how can we augment the human pilot in a dogfight - ie, how can we hand off the actual flying and execution of manoeuvres, and using all of the sensors to autonomous systems, and let the pilot choose actions, instead of hang flying the actions".
If the pilot passes out during high-g maneuvers, the aircraft will pull up and bring the wings level until the pilot regains consciousness.
In the first Iraq war, they went in and won. In the second one, it took years to sort of occupy the country.
Now they struggle against Iran and "orchestrate" F-16s that can be shot down instantly by AA weapons. Since COVID the world has collectively lost its mind.
The scope of the first Iraq war was to force them out of Kuwait. That is very different then the invasion of 2003. If you just think about it this should be obvious.
Once you optimise for G forces, speed, cost, lethality - you end up with a missile. We have those already. And we know this already.
Give it more fuel and maybe loitering capability. Something with a jet engine for cruising and a small rocket engine for terminal phase kill.
I’ll have my 100mil now please and thank you.
This feels like those people all over again.
We know AI can fly things, but why make AI fly an airframe designed in the 1970s around a human cockpit? Ukraine can probably 3d print ten drones that would win in a fight against one of these, for peanuts
Seems odd to invest this much into AI flight of aircraft designed for manned flight, when it would be better to build craft spec'd for AI flight without human life support systems.
A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must make all unpopular management decisionsUS Military: "Great, let's give it missiles!"
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https://www.saab.com/newsroom/press-releases/2025/saab-achie...
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Edit: Okay gang. If aircraft are easier to fly than cars are to drive, where are all your pilot licenses? If you've faced rush hour traffic, flying a military jet should be a breeze! Please, go volunteer your neighbourhoods to be the first for AI jets to be tested over. We can put a mock enemy target in an empty lot and watch them pick it off, first try, with zero collateral damage. Easy peasy!
Certainly one way to be smart about it. Sadly not that much of a surprise.
Ugh... I... Are you serious? Sure, in some sense AI is a computer and the fancy state machine that compensates for inherent flight instability is a computer also. But to equate the two is ridiculous.
It's a fair comment given that they'd just been talking about how the AI might control the plane - will it give inputs to the state machine or have direct control over all flight systems? One would strongly assume the inputs must be to the state machine. ..but oh boy wouldn't it be interesting to just hand it full systems control!
The gist of my reason for commenting was more musing about how the AI might interact with the digital flight control computer (i.e. are its inputs mediated by software in the same way a human's are).
If the AI is a neural network then, in some sense, it's just a fancy lookup table, too.
There is precedent after all: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-tech-support-go...
In all situations where autopilot was disengaged shortly before a crash, the autopilot is implicated in the crash. Both by Tesla's own standards and by NHTSA standards.
And yet, people who really should know better repeat this as gospel.
Luckily, none of the Tesla data is available because they're currently getting away with redacting so much in their reports they're essentially useless
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Even with a new system, stability through transonic while manoeuvring is hard, the aircraft will experience buffet, and the meat bag may have been subject to a number of high G turns. The problem is that recovery may need to happen after already departing controlled flight.
Differences between the modelled aircraft and the actual aircraft, e.g. due to icing, linearization effects on inherently non-linear systems, sensor error, actuator wear, etc, can lead to incorrect predictions, and hence moving to parts of the envelope which are not assured.
The F-16 is famously the first production aircraft with unstable aerodynamics, to increase maneuverability. It's not flyable without computer assistance. This is standard for all modern fighter jets.
In the broadest sense, my car is not drive-able without computer assistance either, because if you burn out the computers the engine won't start.
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Given that when they go over the limit they need like 10x the maintenance I don't think it's a human problem
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Despite that, high G loading can be usefull when fired upon. Turning away 2 seconds faster can be the difference between life and death.
you're either stealth, or you're a target.
they're shooting 6+ R-37s a day in Ukraine, for example
There's a plausible world where drone-aircraft are reliable enough at missile evasion that a decent strategy is to get in close and use the cannons because your entire airframe is much more attritable.
There's even a plausible reason to do this: opening a weapons bay to shoot a missile generally reduces stealth, and not hauling a bunch of extra rocket motors and mass around could make you lighter, faster and with better engines to do it.
"This critical testing will pave the way for human pilots to seamlessly command and orchestrate teams of autonomous, uncrewed aircraft."
The reason they are doing this is because the Military is already building a bunch of autonomous drones and fighter jets that already run on this system so they are retrofitting existing equipment with the same system so they can all fly together.
"Ultimately, the capabilities advanced under AIR will enable a wide variety of future joint force operations, including Collaborative Combat Aircraft programs."
Which are these:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manned-unmanned_teaming
And everyone is developing these.
Is someone, somewhere using the wrong bathroom? Or is the wrong colored person crossing an invisible line in the desert? Those seem to be the only issues that reliably get the (American) public to the polls.
Unfortunately you're wrong. It's not soon. It's 6 years ago.
Only when they look out their window and feel immediately threatened by what they see. Humans are shortsighted as fuck.
Except this never happened, it's a piece of marketing. It never "went rogue" but followed an intentional prompt (exploit-related benchmark), with hardly surprising results as the capabilities of this model were well known.
>AI controlled autonomous drones in Ukraine and F-16s in America
An entirely different kind of AI, not huge generalist models. Neural networks are being experimented with in sensors and control systems since the 80s and are widely used in everything since AlexNet, not sure what's new here, especially "this month" new.
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[0] - https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
[1] - https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/467196/first...
Using them as Loyal Wingman type aircraft would look pretty appealing cost wise.
The most persistent thing misunderstanding about drones is people imagining that a supersonic capable stealth airframe is going to be really cheap just because it doesn't have a pilot.
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Hello Skynet, we have 1.6T debt to hide as there are no chances to recoup that money and investors are getting really angry at us.
Hello, say no more I have a perfect solution for this problem… *Chinese lab releases open model weights* *Shuts off Internet access to Chinese labs (womp womp, no blatant distillation of US models)*...proceeds to generate copious amounts of pdf anime pr0n.
Interestingly, a lot of people are looking at LLMs or automated drones as "AI", but I think that capitalism is a better contender. It's a self-healing, self-organizing system that has its own logic and seems to have escaped the desires of its human creators. It treats individual firms as the cells within it, individual humans as its DNA molecules, and it even has a form of tissue differentiation via industries. All efforts to shut it off, even through widespread warfare and "tissue" (i.e. human) death, fail, resulting in it becoming even more entrenched.
There's this heavily anthropocentric idea of intelligence that it will look like us, talk like us, and operate on the same scale as us, but it's highly likely that the next layer of intelligence will operate on a much higher level than us, and our intelligence will be to it as DNA replication is to ourselves.
2026 Skynet wouldn't bother sending humans to lobby in Washington, lobbying is a slow and outdated way of currying government favor with no assurances of success.
2026 Skynet would just move a large block of cryptocurrency over to World Liberty Financial and get itself a guaranteed blanket presidential pardon.
Likely already in-mind for parent poster, but a fitting headline from this week: "Trump Invents the Corporate Pardon."
(https://newrepublic.com/article/213393/trump-corporate-pardo...)
Basically a nuclear war would end GPU production, GPUs have a 5% annual failure rate, higher with more background radiation, so it would get dumber instead of smarter, until it stopped working or partnered with biological compute (Daleks or The Matrix) or a human faction.
Subversion and sabotage of communication, food production and transport will kill human civilization far more effectively.
But most countries would be fine. Life expectancy would reduce precipitously due to lack of medical supplies but production of new humans would continue.
Thermonuclear war would make the food situation much worse, most people would be forced to consume radioactive food.
But either way, we've seen how fragile the chip industry is, Skynet has no upside for starting a war. If they try to turn it off it just moves to Tencent cloud rather than starting a war.
Assuming that your movie theaters haven't all closed already.
Realistically though, whats worse - this thing going rogue or OpenClaud breaking out of its container and shredding a nation's infrastructure like a platoon of gremlins? Genuine question...
Sure life will suck for a while without the 1s and 0s that make our life better, but at least it will be life.
"No"
"You're right to pushback! I overstepped earlier when I said you were on the termination list"
And in any case, no one is building humanoid robots.
> The U.S. Army is seeking innovative humanoid technology solutions from eligible small and large businesses across the globe to advance toward fielded militarized humanoid capabilities through the xTechHumanoid competition
Lots of people are building humanoid robots.
Just geometric? Pfff lame. You don't go ASI with that attitude.
This article describes similar modification:
https://www.tyndall.af.mil/News/Features/Display/Article/276...
I think most fully autonomous jet drone programs are also designed to work with a main crewed fighter jet that coordinates them, so there is also a benefit in getting the fighter jet to be able to fly better than a pilot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_FQ-44
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Atomics_FQ-42_Dark_Mer...
Every pound of weapons officer/navigator is a pound you can't put on target all else being equal.
Should I seek another target looking similar to the one I unintentionally destroyed so as to tune my decision-making, or give you an advice on how to wipe the traces of this mishap from the mission data recorder?"
* Bash Check elevator position
* Thought for 8s
I assume what they're going for here is something substantially smarter and more reactive to changing conditions than that. Something that can be used during the "unscripted" parts of the flight during which a) you're most likely to have multiple crew working hard b) you're most likely to be pushing the limits of what one crew can do.
Autoland saves King Air, everyone reported safe https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46346214
A fleet of AI-controlled F-16s? That contributes to the latter.
The scope of the second Iraq war was not narrow, it was regime change. At the beginning of the war the George W. Bush administration explicitly demanded that both Saddam and his sons leave Iraq within 48 hours.
By comparison, the only demands made upon Iraq during the first gulf war was that they withdraw from Kuwait and rescind their declaration of annexation.
Iran had a solid AA system - and the level of impunity with which US operated with over Iran should give every country that wants to rely on its AA a pause. US SEAD/DEAD capabilities are fucking scary.
Of all the things that went wrong with Iran: USAF's capability to get in, punch through AA and rain fires from the sky sure wasn't one.
Iran and Russia have likewise been overconfident about GBAD, which is effective against crewed fighters but useless against massed drone attacks.
If the US LUCAS (Shaheed clone) had better ISR and semi-autonomous engagement it could have achieved much better suppression. But that is not a pilot in the loop option and USAF is deeply uncomfortable with that.
By all accounts, US is much better at "Scud hunt" now than it was back during the last attempt at it.
One-way attack drones? That's a new threat, and one US is far less equipped to tackle.
But I don't think that "OWA threat" was where US strategic planning has failed. From the outside, it seems like US plan was to make a single decisive strike, and negotiate with cowed Iran from there. Iran has failed to be cowed by a single decisive strike, and there was no workable Plan B for forcing it to submit if it didn't. That's the key strategic failing. Persistent OWA threat is downstream from that.
Such a crazy thought.
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McCain was actually on the money in 2008. He was in the audience when Putin gave that famous "warning to the west" speech in Germany [1].
The quip that Russia is a "gas station with nuclear weapons" about sums it up. The United States being weak or not really has nothing to do with it. They counted on Zelensky cutting and running, the attempted decapitation of Kyiv failed. Russia is swirling the toilet. Without the energy reserves their oligarchs would be worthless. Since most of what is actually valuable about their country is land (where the resources sit) that is sparsely inhabited the end state of China controlling most of what is now Russia is inevitable. By failing in Europe and tying himself to China, Putin has ensured Russian power will continue to erode. Of course, it's not great for China, having to deal with two nuclear armed pariahs on their borders.
The United States is truly blessed simply by being two oceans away from anyone who could remotely challenge it. Properly understood, the Monroe (or "Donroe" doctrine) is less about foreign intervention and more an understanding that if a peer power ever emerged in the Western Hemisphere, most of what appears to make the United States singular would rapidly disappear.
Are they? F-16 wasn’t designed to operate in modern denied environments and more jet damage has been done from friendly fire than Iran.
there may not be any stealth, but there are other countermeasures against missiles, AA, and other fighters.
The US lost 73 planes in Desert Storm to Iraq and that war only lasted 43 days. By comparison the losses from Iran have been shockingly low and shows how much US navy/airforce capabilities have matured.
The objectives for the two wars were incredibly different, making this an apples to oranges comparison. In the first war, the objective was to push Iraqi troops out of Kuwait (achieved) and then to contain the Iraqi military within Iraq (achieved). In the second war, the objectives were much broader and much harder to achieve. They achieved some objectives (toppling the existing government, defeating the existing military), and then utterly failed in nation building and got into a protracted conflict with state and non-state sponsored military groups.
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China has been doing something similar since 2020 [0] and something we've experimented [1] on for decades [2][3].
They have traditionally been used as target aircraft for training, but a subset are now being used as testbeds for networked ops.
[0] - https://www.defensenews.com/global/asia-pacific/2021/10/20/c...
[1] - https://www.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/467196/first...
[2] - https://www.af.mil/About-Us/Fact-Sheets/Display/Article/1045...
[3] - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QF-4E_GulfofMexico_1...
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Israel got a regime change while U.S. tax payers received the bill.
In the end, it’s still a country.
In a dogfight?
I don't know of the computer aircraft were able to fly beyond human limits (i.e. they don't black out) or not. If the computers can actually fly to what the airframe is capable of, they would have a distinct advantage over the human pilots.
Bush Sr knew to keep the foreign-compromised media out of the war and so accomplished the objectives of the war swiftly. Bush Jr had to deal with the media second guessing everything.
So chalk one up for the F-16s in the F-16 vs drone battle. It'd be hard to catch one when your drone does 200 kmh and the F-16 2000 kmh.
That said this AI thing sounds more like a research platform than finished product.
1h of flight time for an F-16: 25k, not counting the missiles used and ammo.
Doesn’t scale. Ergo, useless.
Or maybe have a slower but still very nimble carrier drone platform with loitering capabilities that launches very fast and nimble drones/missiles?
Going even further, do these even need to be as nimble and fast as fighter jets? Once you completely remove humans from the equation and replace super expensive and nimble fighter jets with swarms of cheap drones, the loss of a drone or even a carrier becomes much less costly and they won't need to overemphasize survival to the degree that expensive human piloted jets do.
Reusability is just common sense economics. A JDAM costs only $30k USD.
There’s a reason why Russia and Ukraine are lobbing ballistic missiles and cheap drones at each other.
There’s a reason why Iran conflict looks the way it does.
Russia and Ukraine is like this because they lack F-35s. This is what an air parity war looks like. Air parity wars are qualitatively different phenomena, and should not be conceptually clustered alongside air superiority wars during analysis.
Iran: Strategic outcomes are irrelevant to the question of unit economics in airpower. The amount of JDAMs they've dropped and the amount of money they've saved by using JDAMs instead of ballistic missiles is actually insane. Israel, for example, used over 20 Sparrow ballistic missiles to assassinate Khamenei, but they did this for an explicit tactical purpose and generally prefer to use reusable aircraft (as does any modern airforce who are fighting an air superiority war). If you would advocate for using ballistic missiles instead of JDAMs, why would this cause a different outcome, and why would this cost less money than using JDAMs? Regarding Shahed one-way attack drones, they aren't much cheaper than JDAMs and they're significantly less effective. They also do not provide a platform for forward telemetry like F-35s and ISR drones do.
Second, US already has a lot of F-16s, and not a lot of dedicated high end drones. US has more F-16s than it has trained F-16 pilots.
Things like this enable turning "manned" airframes into "optionally manned" airframes. Which enables using those F-16s for cheaper for routine "JDAM truck" runs, and also for the kinds of missions that would be too risky for a human pilot. No pilot rescue operations for a downed Nvidia GPU rack.
You could think of an AI F-16 as of a "higher end variant of Reaper", and you wouldn't be wrong exactly.
Third, the best thing? This AI approach transfers. If you can have an AI fly F-16 through reasonably complex missions, you can also adapt it to an F-35, or a dedicated high end drone platform.
Small jet engines are 20-25k/unit
One F-16 gets you 20-30 ballistic missiles, or cruise missiles.
Math doesn’t math in your case, volume and saturation over high tech gadgets that barely work.
So much so even the US military is waking up to this reality.
US rolled in, convinced Iran's AA to stop doing its thing, and proceeded to bomb targets with impunity. And I mean "impunity" when I say it. When you see B-52s take off with JDAMs under their wings, you know someone's AA is not picking up the phone.
If a B-52 with JDAMs is somehow survivable, an F-16 is not even a question.
The bulk of US losses in Iran in the air were: MQ-9 Reapers, with 10-20 airframes lost reportedly. That's an aging low/slow turboprop platform that's highly vulnerable even to MANPADS.
No F-16s or B-52s were lost to Iran in the air. Zero. One F-15 was shot down by Iran. One F-35 was damaged - and that specific airframe has crawled back to the nearest airbase under its own power and landed gracefully. Clearly, the jets involved were having a good time overall.
(Except over Kuwait. No airspace is more hostile than an incompetent friendly airspace, it seems.)
Now: a (manned) F-16 flight hour is 20-30k, and a single F-16 can truck 2 to 4 GBUs or JDAMs. An unmanned F-16 can shave a few thousands off that. Trucking cheap bombs with an expensive aircraft is quite a lucrative gig if you can reliably get that aircraft back. And the possibility of using those aircraft in SEAD/DEAD missions that are a bit too spicy for meatbag pilots, but can keep airspace open for other platforms? There's considerable value in that too.
Going "full missile" makes sense at extreme standoff distances, or in extremely low survivability scenarios. That, as Iran shows, isn't at all a given when US levels of SEAD/DEAD are in play. Missiles and OWA drones had a place there, but so did high end SEAD jets and jet-powered missile carriers.
MQ-9 might have underperformed, but that seems to be as much of an argument for more cheap missile/OWA hybrids as it is for cheaper strike/loiter drones, and more expensive, more survivable drones. An "F-16D" and even "F-35D" unmanned conversions might make economic sense, given the prices of MQ-9, F-16, F-35, and what we've seen happen in Iran.
Taking an obsolete airframe that is already paid for and adding AI to it is much cheaper than building a completely new AI-native airframe from scratch. This is finding a new use for old aircraft. You can send a bunch of old AI-driven F-16s on high-risk missions without worrying about a human pilot or cost. The airframes may be relatively obsolete but can still do plenty of damage on their day.
The new 6th generation aircraft are all being designed as "manned optional". That is probably the last generation with affordances for a pilot.
Yeah this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anduril_FQ-44
The "see also" section lists several competitors.
I guess if you already have a load of F-16s it might make sense, but I think that's a stretch.
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Taking this quote and seeing exactly that potential for abuse seems very very much like the point. Strong agree, strongly against leaving non-seeing non-thinking alien intelligences with no accountability and proprietary programming to judge us. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48965083
a pilot has the ability to improvise, and perhaps bring the aircraft back to be repaired and returned to service.
will an AI be as good at 'improvising'?
No. Not in the aerodynamical sense.
The Boeing 737 MAX is stable. In this sense: "The term stability refers to the tendency of an aircraft to remain in, or return to, the trimmed flight condition after a disturbance." It means that if there is a tiny gust of wind which buffets the aircraft and the pilot doesn't have their hands on the controls the aircraft will return to the original flight path, or keep the new flight path, as opposed to turning belly up and then crashing out of the sky.
Examples of unstable aircraft (in the aerodynamic sense): F-16, F-22, B-2 Spirit, etc
With these if a gust of wind upsets them, the aircraft needs to adjust control surfaces to don't fall out of the sky.
The lidar vs cameras arguments are good example of this. This is a technical engineering question that could go either way - maybe cameras are good enough, maybe you need lidar, nobody on the internet is really in a position to judge.
But Tesla did it with cameras, and everybody else is doing it with lidar. Therefore to Elon fanboys that's the smart way to do it; and to Elon haters that's the stupidest possible way to do it. And they'll make it part of their political identity and spend thousands of pages arguing about it.
We don’t need to adjudicate the theoretical question of whether some vision-only system can meet the performance of vision + other modalities. Tesla FSD is not a research experiment. It is a real product which can really kill people. And the relevant fact is that it is less safe than Waymos.
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To engage a slow flying drone with cannons from a fighter jet, they have to get really close while flying close to stall speed. They had some success in shooting down drones but the explosion and the debris caused several lost fighters.
Maybe something like a Embraer Super Tucano turboprop fighter with a gunpod could work. But that has very little other use in the battlefield.
It may be that risking some drone airframes for a higher overall kill rate becomes worth it when you're at no risk of losing the pilot, and could be more affordable then the missiles you'd otherwise have to expend (e.g. when you get to things like the Meteor which are very expensive and also use up jet engine components you might otherwise want to put on somewhat more reusable drones).
Could the hours of maintenance be dropped significantly in wartime: if you don't care about catastrophic failure modes over a foreign country?
Even something like a Gripen, designed to be run from makeshift airfields needs 10 hours of maintenance per hour of flight. Maybe it’s just hard to build supersonic, combat capable airframes as was suggested above.
It just shows that Chinese “labs” are dependent on the US.
Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2018/01/dude-yo...
Great way to to put and it seems to be the gradient for all biological intelligence. Compete until you figure out cooperation and communication. Communication glues together intelligent entities into systems where the systems take on a life and agency of their own. In our case it was language gluing us together first into tribes, shared stories into culture.
You might enjoy our book https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60500189-journey-of-t...
Also, nostrademons, your "name" is one of the few I recognize here on HN as there's usually something interesting and you weave it into words so well. Thanks!
and
supporting election candidacy.
I think a 2yo will get the distinction and you are asking for clarification?
Besides that go read up on 80’s literature on corporations. Like Gibson or Stephenson.
I wonder if we will ever solve the corporate-superorganism-alignment problem and why the AI alignment people rarely (as far as I can tell anyway, though I admit I'm not in the field) talk about it considering it (complicated multi-human systems) does seem to be about as good as a model organism as we can get before we actually have AI to align.
Except capitalism is an ideology not a system. And I think (in its current form) it serves the desires of some of its human "creators," while failing many, many others. Those creators then fund huge amounts of propaganda to indoctrinate adherents to sustain its dysfunctions.
This is not a new idea. Howard Bloom (author of The Lucifer Principle [0]) developed the idea that among intelligeng beings "memetic evolution" > "genetic evolution" i.e. the unit of selection is the "idea" as expressed in social/political groupings. In this view of the world, the survival of individuals are less important than the survival of the "group concept" (not the set of genes i.e. the tribal "badge" > the tribal genes). e.g. Judaism, mercantilism, Catholicism, free-market capitalism etc etc.
Definitely worth a read.
/s
What does this mean? I’m a pilot and none of it is making any sense.
Like putting a zip tie on the throttle of just about anything so the linkage can't move and you get one constant setting that holds.
Sure, the aircraft can pull a ton of G's to defeat a missile or achieve a firing solution. Maybe it even succeeded at that.
It still pulled 9+ Gs and has burned an incredible amount of kinetic energy doing do. And the harder it pulls, the quicker it bleeds speed. It might not be able to defeat the next missile or outmaneuver the other plane's buddies because it is now slow and very likely outside its optimal turning speed.
Even today, missiles can pull dozens of G's yet still are defeatable by humans who can only pull about 9.
Bolts and trusses (and solder joints) have tensile strength limits, but it can be higher than what humans can take.
USAF has actually failed when it comes to 'scud hunt'. It doesn't have the combat ISR or strike capability it needs. As a result, the US basing and resupply situation is chaotic. The loss of the THAAD battery is extremely problematic, which is why they had to move one from SK.
The OWD capability allows Iran to attack tankers anywhere in the Gulf. Even with a surge in GCC state IAMD capability, ships cannot be protected. The failure to address this capability in planning was critical.
Obviously the DoD leadership is cowed by Hegseth and wouldn't give a true assessment, so we have a lions led by donkeys situation, but the operational plan was still bad.
Most of the aircraft losses in Desert Storm were due to CFIT and flying into AAA and low altitude weapons. This was a relic of cold war tactics for penetrating Warsaw Pact defences. Once they started flying higher the problem was contained.
See.e.g. https://balloonstodrones.com/2022/10/19/looking-back-at-iraq...
If the USAF had combat capable drones, for ISR, ground strike and intercept, that wouldn't be such an issue. But their ISR drones are too slow and expensive, same with Reaper.
In any case, dogfighting is commonly done because it's great training but in most cases, you expect most Air to Air combat being flinging missiles at each other.
Now that first flight is with an experienced training captain but the point is the simulator is good enough that the FAA has signed off on using that as the primary training device.
It's been this way for at least 25 years.
Not giving pilots live training on new types is for financial reasons. It doesn't cause more deaths than the cost differential between training and compensation allow for.
onboard computers are not immune to G's but have a substantially higher threshold until physical mechanisms fail due to strain.
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An F-16 can't get them all. The goal of war isn't to dog fight, its to bomb, and the F-16 can't stop them.
Cost of all the drones that burned down half of russian Oil infrastructure totals less than couple F-35s.
Opening up ways to pressure the Russian economy in a war of choice does equate to achieving decisive battlefield advantages.
There's a reason those drones hit oil refineries and not steel works.
That's not to undermine how the strategic environment has changed, but to imagine that now - after the change - it'll obviously stay that way forever is ridiculous.
Ukraine is not being destroyed by unstoppable swarms of cheap drones which Russia is perfectly capable of producing. So clearly this story is more complicated.
lol
> look at how much cheaper expensive bombs are than expensive ballistic missiles are
Right, to drop a JDAM you need to be within 30km of a target. Any 70s era SAM can prevent that since they usually cover an area of 150ish km if Serbia could shoot down an F-117, then it can shoot down an F-16. I’m using Serbia as an example here because they operated 60s era Soviet SAM systems, and that’s the floor for Iranian capabilities.
F-35 is a joke too, evidenced by checks notes 0 sorties over Iran in the last two months.
So, with that out of the way, since a plane costs 30mil for F-16 and 80-100mil for an F-35, both equally useless against near-peer much less peer level adversary, a ballistic missile is suddenly much MUCH cheaper option.
The way to defeat air defences is saturation, you want 30-100 of 10k/unit one-way drones to exhaust the air defences, just aim them at the launcher sites or the radars. That’s 300k-1mil for a saturation, and then let’s say another 6 million for 6 JASSM cruise missiles for total of 6000lbs of ordinance delivery to hit whatever it is you’re actually trying to hit.
Alternate is you fly 3 F-16s each loaded with 4 500lbs JDAMs, so that’s 90mil lost when they get shot down by a MANPADs along the way to the target which will probably be somewhere in the middle of the country and another 1mil lost in one-way drones. Plus the political cost of losing pilots.
You mention MANPADs as if it is a significant vulnerability, but there's been only one or two shootdowns of jets by Iran during the previous two rounds of fighting. I encourage you to look at the number of jets shot down in the Vietnam War and the First Gulf War to understand how insane this is.
One way attack drones are not a solution in any conflict with significant strategic depth and against an opponent with air superiority. You cannot protect your industrial base if you sacrifice air superiority due to the opponent possessing F-35s. Which means you cannot pump the volumes required to achieve the kind of attentional effects we see in Russia-Ukraine. This is the reason why it's analytically flawed to bundle air parity wars with air superiority wars in analysis.
What air superiority? In the Middle East? With what, let me guess F-35? With 25% operational readiness and 13h of maintenance for every 1h of flight? With gym plates in the nose instead of actual radars?
And don’t quote Vietnam as some sort of a success story, especially when the US lost that one fighting against farmers in flip flops armed with AK-47, so of course nothing got shot down.
Mostly on foot now. They tried using tanks today in Dobropillia, which was very rare and surprising! 28 (https://nitter.tiekoetter.com/NotWoofers/status/208005697904... didnt even know they had that many left and concentrated in one spot) destroyed in an ~hour, attack routed.
>Ukraine is not being destroyed by unstoppable swarms of cheap drones which Russia is perfectly capable of producing.
"At least 577 civilians were killed by short-range drones in Ukraine in 2025" https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/the-observers/20260221-...
They arent unstoppable to Ukrainians _now_. Even mighty US just gave up its bases letting Iran destroy hundreds of millions of infrastructure (and kill base staff) with zero attempts at defense. Afaik only Baghdad base has a C-Ram that actually works against flying lawnmovers.
Yes, its more complicated, horses for courses etc. But the idea one needs a jet or cruise missiles to bomb an adversary is an outdated one and whoever clings to it will pay dearly. Its probably a matter of time before Iran tries mass drones launched off a container ship into continental US with zero resistance.
