New Details On The Secretive Air Force Plan For Teaming Fighter Pilots With Drones
Needing to balance solving unknowns about the Collaborative Combat Aircraft against demand for its disruptive abilities is driving decisions.
BY
HOWARD ALTMAN
| PUBLISHED SEP 26, 2022 12:39 PM
New Details On The Secretive Air Force Plan For Teaming Fighter Pilots With
Sometime in the future, the Air Force wants to see a fighter pilot be able to go into battle accompanied by as many as five drones under his or her limited control, ready to fire weapons, gather intelligence, jam communications, or serve as decoys.
But making this Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA) concept - a new black-budget program to team pilots with drones - a reality presents many challenges. CCAs are "something in our future,” Gen. Mark D. Kelly, commander of Air Combat Command (ACC), told a group of reporters, including from The War Zone, Wednesday during the Air and Space Forces Air, Space & Cyber conference at National Harbor, Maryland. "The discussion is, how are we going to get there?"
Over the course of the three-day conference, which also features a major industry trade show, Kelly and other Air Force leaders talked about the challenges of getting the concept off the drawing board and into fighter squadrons. Among things that have to be considered are how to build them so they are both functional and expendable, how best to test them and integrate them into units and how many a squadron might receive.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/new-details-on-the-secretive-air-force-plan-for-teaming-fighter-pilots-with-drones
