Originally Posted By: lubricatosaurus
Originally Posted By: Astro14
If there is risk from the fuel in the missile to the pilot in the F-15, you can turn an F-15 into a remotely piloted vehicle.
Not an autonomous drone. This airplane is bit too complex for that, given the current state of the art.
Nothing "too complex" about the F-15 here. Nonsense. A retrofit can be made that takes an F-15 from takeoff to landing with no human in the loop. Full navigation and flight control, with failure handling as well. Pilots may have the flowing scarf, but computers these days can do it all. The exception may be target identification in an air-to-air environment, although decision makers in AWACS or other command and control centers can ID the threat before firing on it.
Your understanding of fighter tactics and weapons systems is poor. Target ID and engagement isn't that simple. Radars are limited in range, discrimination and ID capability. An AWACS often cannot tell friend from foe. Often it cannot see the target due to line of sight considerations. Just like guys engaging the enemy on the ground, decision making has to be executed forward, not at the rear, not remotely, and not by computers.
There is a legal issue here too. Killing people should be decided on by a human. No weapons are released by our current inventory of drones without humans making the kill decision. This is critically important when close to friendlies and when collateral damage is a consideration. Cruise missiles are a different matter, autonomous, but targeted and released by a human.
Computers do not make life or death decisions.
And your understanding is colored by your clear disdain for pilots and your clear belief in the superiority of computers. But computers fail. Air France 447 was a clear failure of engineering. The autopilot (that would be flying an autonomous aircraft) pitched the airplane up into a stall based on erroneous air data inputs from a poorly engineered sensor. Engineering failure begat engineering failure.
The pilots didn't recover from the stall. Flying failure due to training deficiencies.
But if that were an autonomous airplane, it would have crashed just the same. Computers can't do it all. Not when poor engineering provides them with faulty inputs. Not when they fail, as the Air Asia rudder system failed. As numerous components have, and will continue, to fail in flight.
The F-15 can be made to fly as a drone. But it's not as simple as "computers can do it all".
You've got flap, gear, throttle, flight control interfaces that need to be built. F-4s fly as drones. So do F-16s. But they're remote piloted and complex actuators are installed.
Built from the ground up, as the X-47 is, those control systems become electric, and easy to build. But the retrofit is complex and not at all simple.