Drones Need Humans, Badly; Pilots Getting More Dough « Breaking Defense - Defense industry news, analysis and commentary: Even unmanned aircraft need people to make them fly. Today, Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James announced stopgap measures to shore up overworked drone squadrons. At the same press conference, the service’s Chief of Staff pledged to plug another personnel gap, the shortage of skilled maintainers for the manned F-35 — but, Gen. Mark Welsh admitted, the expedients required would be “painful.”
So even in the service most enamored of technology, the knottiest problems sometimes still turn out to be old-fashioned human beings.
The MQ-1 Predator and its big brother, the MQ-9 Reaper, have become pop culture icons of modern warfare, but pop culture forgets how labor-intensive they are to operate. Not only do they need maintenance crews, intelligence analysts, and sensor operators, each drone requires a human pilot flying it by remote control every second it’s in the air. That’s why the Air Force prefers the term Remotely Piloted Aircraft or RPA. (More advanced drones like the Global Hawk and Triton require less constant hand-holding). All those humans are under stress today, but none more so than the pilots
