Air Force News, news from Iraq - Air Force Times

Are enlisted airmen next to pilot UAVs?

The Air Force is desperate for UAV pilots, yet it stands alone among the services in its policy that only officers are allowed to fly large unmanned aerial vehicles.

But next month, in a reversal of policy, 10 nonrated officers — those without aviation training — will begin instruction on flying Predator and Reaper UAVs. could enlisted airmen be next?

Chief of Staff Gen. Norton Schwartz left open the possibility immediately after he approved allowing nonrated officers to fly UAVs.

“No options are off the table, ... I don’t dismiss that as a possibility,” he said as he walked down from the stage at the Air Force Association convention in Washington, D.C., in September.

Three months later, in early December, Chief Master Sgt. of the Air Force Rodney McKinley said the option for enlisted pilots remains in play and he had “confidence enlisted airmen have the capabilities if tasked.”

Defense Secretary Robert Gates describes the demand for UAVs as “insatiable” as ground commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan have come to depend on the full-motion video and close-air support they provide.

To keep up, the Air Force has put UAVs on top of its wish list. Next year, 52 of the 93 aircraft the Air Force will purchase are unmanned.

Likewise, the demand for pilots and sensor operators grows as the Air Force looks to establish 50 Predator and Reaper orbits — round-the-clock combat air patrols — by 2012. That’s an increase of 17 orbits from the Air Force’s current total, which will require 1,100 crews of one pilot and one sensor operator. The service now has 474 crews, according to Air Combat Command.

To meet the surge in demand, the Air Force is ramping up its training pipeline, growing its training capacity from 160 new crews per year to 360 by 2010 with the opening of new training schools at Holloman Air Force Base, N.M., and March Air Reserve Base, Calif.

Critics, however, say that by restricting the UAV pilot career field to officers, the Air Force has unnecessarily limited its UAV growth potential — and point to the Army, in which enlisted soldiers fly UAVs in the war zones, track insurgents and fire on targets.

Those critics include some in Congress. The more congressional funding that goes to purchasing UAVs and training operators, the more lawmakers and their staffs are studying UAV operations.

One congressional staff member sitting in a defense authorization committee that has studied both Army and Air Force UAV pilot programs said questions arise about why the Air Force can’t have enlisted pilots.

“It’s difficult for us to come right out and say, ‘Air Force: You shall not use officers as pilots; you shall use sergeants,’” he said, asking not to be named. “But it’s perfectly obvious to everybody except senior levels of the Air Force that that’s what they need to do.”

Some critics point to enlisted UAV pilots as a potential cost-saving measure. Rated pilots, proficient after years of expensive training and flying hours, are cycled into UAV slots for two to three years at a minimum. When pilots return to manned aircraft, requalification training comes with a big price tag. It costs roughly $700,000, for example, to send F-15 pilots through a requalification course, according to a Rand Corp. report published in November.

Piloting debate

Chief Master Sgt. Bruce Garcia, 196th Reconnaissance Squadron superintendent, said he is convinced an enlisted airman could fly a UAV.

“The simple answer is yes. I don’t see why they couldn’t fly them,” said Garcia, who oversees the enlisted sensor operators who fly UAV combat missions out of March.

M.L. Cummings, a former F/A-18 pilot and director of the Humans and Automation Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, agreed.

“The Army’s enlisted program is a good illustration of that,” said Cummings, who teaches UAV ground control station design.

Air Force leaders argue that comparisons between its programs and the Army’s are misleading because enlisted soldiers fly smaller UAVs that don’t carry the same weapons load as Air Force Reapers and Predators.

But that argument has lost weight as enlisted soldiers are set to fly the Sky Warrior — a UAV that is a foot longer and can carry 325 pounds more than the MQ-1 Predator — in Iraq this summer.

Four Sky Warriors armed with four Hellfire missiles will be deployed this summer and another four will be shipped a year later, said Maj. Jimmie Cummings, an Army spokesman.

The Navy also plans to add new maritime UAVs similar in size to the Predator and Sky Warrior, and Navy officials are considering establishing an enlisted job specialty for UAV pilots.

“This opens up an opportunity to maybe naval flight officers, and there may be opportunities [for] even enlisted personnel to be not only part of the sensor crew but the unmanned operator,” said Capt. Bob Dishman, the project manager for the Navy’s persistent maritime unmanned aircraft systems.

Maj. Hilton Nunez, Army UAV Division team chief, said the debate over whether a UAV pilot should have a commission is moot as long as that pilot receives the right training.

“When you look at this and say, ‘Shouldn’t an officer be doing this?’ then that’s implying that officers are smarter than enlisted folks when in fact it’s just the difference of the training,” he said.

The Army starts training its enlisted UAV pilots straight out of basic training. The pilots spend the first nine weeks in a common core UAV training before moving to training specific to the platform they will fly. Hunter and Shadow training is 12 weeks and Sky Warrior training is 25 weeks. As of October, the Army had trained 3,200 UAV enlisted operators, Maj. Cummings said.

Air Force Predator and Reaper pilots spend two to three months learning to fly UAVs at Creech Air Force Base, Nev., said Lt. Col. Lawrence Spinetta, 11th Reconnaissance Squadron commander.

However, these airmen have spent hours inside these manned aircraft cockpits conducting the “many more tasks and missions” the Air Force expects from its UAV fleet than “the Army expects of its UAV force,” Spinetta wrote in an article in the November/December issue of C4ISR Journal, a sister publication of Air Force Times.

Those aviation skills are especially useful for complex missions. Following a vehicle with a Predator or Reaper requires the pilot to maneuver the aircraft with a joystick instead of setting points on a map for the unmanned aircraft to follow, he said in a phone interview.

“Chasing vehicles through the crowded streets and urban canyons of Sadr City demands more precise control than a generic, fixed, computer-generated orbit can offer,” Spinetta wrote.

He said the Air Force also needs an officer in control when orders come to fire a Hellfire missile at that vehicle, especially at a time when UAVs are becoming more deadly. An MQ-9 Reaper can carry the same weapons load as an F-16, and an officer is needed to oversee the use of that firepower, Spinetta said.

Chief Master Sgt. Steven Hanson, superintendent of the 214th Reconnaissance Group, agreed. “An officer should be the one who carries the responsibility of crashing one of these aircraft or bombing the wrong target.”

However, Nunez argued enlisted troops armed with M-4s carry the burden of lethal force as they walk the streets of Iraq and Afghanistan every day.

But a big piece of the debate, some say, entails how enlisted flyers would be accepted in the Air Force’s culture.

It’s not that “enlisted don’t fly because they don’t have the ability. They don’t fly because pilots run the Air Force and they want to keep it that way,” Hanson said.

Col. Curt Sheldon, assistant to the director of air operations, said the Air Force wants officers to fly because it gives them that experience when they lead flying squadrons.

Having officers fly is ingrained into the Air Force culture, and in the early stages of UAV aviation that is where the service will start, he said.

“It’s not 1909, when it comes to [UAVs] but it’s darn near close,” said Gen. Stephen Lorenz, commander of Air Education and Training Command.

“When you start something new, you start with what we know and we have had officers as pilots from our beginning,” Sheldon said.

Air Force Brig. Gen. Lyn D. Sherlock, director of air operations for operations, plans and requirements at the Pentagon, was one of the key leaders to decide to open UAV piloting to nonrated officers. She said the Air Force has not yet extended the same opportunity to enlisted airmen because of the need for UAV pilots to integrate their mission with a wide range of assets and units, tasks for which the Air Force trains and develops officers.

“We need them to bring their officer expertise to our headquarters and working with our partners in the other services within the joint world,” she said at the AFA convention in September.

Loren Thompson, a defense analyst with the Lexington Institute, said the debate over enlisted or officer falls to the services’ priorities regarding quality versus quantity.

“The main driver of Army operational practice is the desire to get reconnaissance to war fighters in the field as fast as possible,” Thompson said. “The Air Force is more oriented to national- and theater-level users. It’s much more interested in getting the mission right and protecting the airframe than a quick turnaround.”

$60K re-enlistment bonuses

Fat re-enlistment bonuses and the chance to fly combat missions in Iraq and Afghanistan make UAVs attractive to Army enlistees, Hanson and Garcia said.

Enlisted soldiers in the rapidly growing career field have benefited both in the pocketbook and when it comes time for promotion.

“Unlike any other career field, this is the fastest-growing with the brightest future because of its growth,” Nunez said.

Army UAV operators promote at a higher rate than the average soldier as the career field continues to expand, Nunez said.

The Army also made UAV operators eligible for a high selective re-enlistment bonus: a lump-sum payment reaching $18,000 depending on rank and length of commitment.

In the Air Force, enlisted imagery analysts are the ones getting rich off the UAV boom. That career field, which includes sensor operators and the intelligence personnel who analyze the feed, is eligible for one of the highest re-enlistment bonuses this year, some reaching more than $60,000.

Nunez said the Army needs to issue the bonuses to keep soldiers in because high-paying jobs as UAV pilots are available if they get out. Civilian salaries for experienced UAV pilots can start as high as $100,000, according to industry officials.

But it’s not only airmen and soldiers who could be making money. The Air Force conserves money any time it can keep a manned aircraft pilot out of a UAV cockpit.

When a pilot returns to the aircraft he was initially trained to fly, that pilot must complete requalification training, which can get expensive. It costs roughly $700,000 to send an F-15 pilot through a requalification course, according to a Rand Corp. report published in November.

Future unmanned systems

As UAV technology advances and these unmanned birds take new shapes, the requirements for those who fly them will change, M.L. Cummings said.

Air Force leaders are already seeing this materialize inside a trailer at Creech, where enlisted airmen fly UAV combat missions every day, Hanson said.

Two officer pilots and four enlisted sensor operators sit in the Multi-Aircraft Control system — referred to as the MAC — which can fly up to four missions at a time.

The officers take over only during emergencies or to fire weapons. The rest of the time the enlisted sensor operators fly the UAV.

Like other ground control stations, the sensor operators’ consoles in the MAC are almost identical to a pilot’s, allowing them to take control of the aircraft. The four sensor operators inside the MAC fly the aircraft inside an airspace outlined by the pilot, said Maj. Matt Martin, ACC Predator and Reaper Operations Branch chief.

Over 80,000 combat hours have been flown using the MAC since March 2006 — with “a lot of tactical success” — but even though it allows the Air Force to fly more missions with fewer pilots, Martin said it’s “not really ideal.”

The pilots can become overburdened by multiple missions, he said, so only the most experienced pilots — those with at least 500 UAV flying hours — are allowed to oversee the MAC.

What the MAC doesn’t do is save on sensor operator manpower, and Spinneta said sensor operators are needed just as desperately as pilots.

But the MAC model in which one pilot flies multiple UAV missions may expand. Air Force leaders plan to tinker with it as part of the Advanced Cockpit program, which officials hope will streamline controls and allow some missions to be more easily transferred from one station to another.

This would allow some pilots to fly the less-taxing portions of multiple missions, such as traveling to a target or signals-intelligence collection missions that entail loitering for hours or even days over a target.

The Army is already a step ahead. Soldiers can use a remote video terminal to direct UAVs flying overhead, said Col. Gregory Gonzalez, Unmanned Aircraft Systems project manager.

Cummings, the MIT professor, declared that the multiple-mission model is the future UAV operations. She is working to advance UAV technologies to a point where she said one human could direct as many as 1,000 missions at the same time.

“The issue isn’t who should be piloting them; the issue is there are different architectures the Air Force should be using,” Cummings said.

The Air Force should simplify its systems and switch from a stick-and-rudder to a point-and click-system that relies more on automation the Army uses, she said.

The research done by the Air Force Research Laboratory has proven that, but Air Force leaders are hesitant to trust the advances made in automation, Cummings said.

“If a pilot can fly so many missions at the same time, then this whole issue of not having enough pilots and the difference between officers and enlisted wouldn’t matter anymore,” she said.

———

Staff writers Andrew Tilghman, Sam LaGrone and Ben Iannotta contributed to this story.

Related reading:

Air Force has big plans for Reapers

480th seeks new ways to get intel to troops