Will US cut number of operators on drone missions?

The US Air Force deploys Predator and Reaper unmanned drones in places such as Afghanistan, parts of Africa, southwest Asia and the Middle East. The top intelligence officer for the USAF, Lt. Gen. Robert Otto, wants to tweak the program.

He wants to cut the operating teams from two to one person, a move that raises questions of accuracy.

"There's not many of these aircraft, relatively speaking," says Stephen Trimble, reporter for FlightGlobal. "They're needed constantly. They fly them in 24-hour/seven-day-a-week surveillance orbits, and that requires a constant rotation of crews." 

Each crew includes a pilot who steers the aircraft and fires weapons, and a sensor operator who watches video sent from the drone, wherever it's flying. Lt. Gen. Otto proposes reducing the flight crew for these unmanned vehicles to a single pilot doing both tasks.

Last week, Trimble quoted Otto as saying: "There are certainly missions that could be done by one woman or one man managing both the aircraft and the sensors if we architected the ground station to support it."

What Otto has in mind, Trimble says, is a redesigned cockpit that would mimic the inside of a fighter jet such as a Lockheed Martin F-16A, which flies combat missions with just one pilot. "What he's saying is that they need to start saving money when it comes to operating these (remotely piloted) aircraft," says Trimble, who reported that the Reaper and Predator programs require about "1,000 pilots and 1,000 sensor operators." Collapsing the pilot and sensor operator role into one job "could potentially reduce manpower requirements by hundreds of sensor operators," Trimble wrote this week in FlightGlobal.

Any reduction of staff raises the issue of productivity — and accuracy. In the case of an armed Reaper or Predator, that could mean life or death for bystanders near a targeted kill. While there have been wide-ranging estimates about numbers of civilian deaths from drone strikes, there is no question that innocents have been killed.  

So could a single operator manage to pilot, monitor the sensor data and also shoot a target as accurately as a two-person crew? Richard Whittle, author of Predator: The Secret Origins of the Drone Revolution offers a tentative "yes."

“There have, indeed, been unintended casualties,” Whittle says. “But when that’s the case, that’s usually been because of incorrect intelligence. I don’t think it’s a case that the crew is having trouble with accuracy. They hit what they are told to hit.”

Whittle, who also reported on Lt Gen Otto’s remarks last week, says the cockpit of the drone could be simplified, but he believes the idea of a one-person drone crew may not yet be fully developed. “Even General Otto said there may be times when there might be two people [at the controls]. One of those times might be when you want to bomb a target.”

Today a typical UAV cockpit might be tucked away in a trailer in the desert outside Las Vegas, at Creech Air Force Base. "It looks like a desk" says FlightGlobal’s Stephen Trimble, “like an office desk with a bank of monitors, and a keyboard that is stuffed into a trailer that's air conditioned."

But it's no F-16. And it's not likely to attract pilots who want to be flying fighter jets, real ones. "They have to be more fun than sitting in a trailer at a desk," observes Trimble, "but at the same time, there are people who really do just enjoy this part of it. And the Air Force has been attracting a certain kind of pilot who [has] wanted to do this kind of thing from the beginning."

Trimble notes that the US Army, which also flies remotely piloted missions, does not use highly-trained pilots to operate its UAVs. "They use warrant officers — or enlisted personnel — and that saves them a lot of money, because they’re not devoting all those resources to training these people," he notes. "Of course they have a lot less flexibility when they operate the aircraft to change the mission while they're already started… The Air Force buys itself some more flexibility by having these highly-trained pilots at these seats."

Much has been said about the turnover in drone pilots. Trimble says a redesign of the Reaper and Predator ground control cockpit won't solve the problem of drone operator burn-out. "I don't see how that would have a direct impact. There are other factors … the irregularity of the operations and how that affects sleep cycles and how it affects morale overall. Just even the disconnected nature of the operation sometimes takes a toll on people. And there's also the question throughout this whole program about what kind of career track [these officers] are on. And those issues are not directly impacted by this."

"But, if they design the cockpit right it shouldn't add to their stress level," Trimble observes. "In fact it could reduce the amount of stress that they're dealing with."