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United States Air Force Needs a Few Hundred Good Drone Pilots
The military brass in charge of America's drones say that there's a shortage of pilots.
According to The New York Times, a "significant number" of the 1,200 United States Air Force pilots are "coming up for re-enlistment and are opting to leave, while a training program is producing only about half of the new pilots that the service needs."
Col. James Cluff, commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing, invited the Times along with a few other media onto the decade-old nerve center of drone operations outside of Las Vegas on Tuesday. He told them that the Air Force has pulled instructors from schools to the "flight line." The agency now conducts 65 drone flights a day, a number that is expected to drop to 60 by fall 2015.
With the rise of the Islamic State and other global hotspots, there is increasing pressure on the Air Force to provide more drone flights. But while drone operators get to see their families at night and are half a globe away from their targets, it still takes a toll.
"Having our folks make that mental shift every day, driving into the gate and thinking, 'All right, I've got my war face on, and I'm going to the fight,' and then driving out of the gate and stopping at Wal-Mart to pick up a carton of milk or going to the soccer game on the way home—and the fact that you can't talk about most of what you do at home—all those stressors together are what is putting pressure on the family, putting pressure on the airman," Col. Cluff said.
Any takers?
USAF Cuts Drone Flights as Stress Drives Off Operators
The NYT reports that the US is being forced to cut back on drone flights as America's drone operators are burning out and the Air Force is losing more drone pilots than they can train. "We're at an inflection point right now," says Col. James Cluff, the commander of the Air Force's 432nd Wing. Drone missions increased tenfold in the past decade, relentlessly pushing the operators in an effort to meet the insatiable demand for streaming video of insurgent activities in Iraq, Afghanistan and other war zones, including Somalia, Libya and now Syria. The biggest problem is that a significant number of the 1,200 pilots are completing their obligation to the Air Force and are opting to leave. Colonel Cluff says that many feel "undermanned and overworked," sapped by alternating day and night shifts with little chance for academic breaks or promotion.
What had seemed to be a benefit of the job, the novel way that the crews could fly Predator and Reaper drones via satellite links while living safely in the United States with their families, has created new types of stresses as they constantly shift back and forth between war and family activities and become, in effect, perpetually deployed. The colonel says the stress on the operators belied a complaint by some critics that flying drones was like playing a video game or that pressing the missile fire button 7,000 miles from the battlefield made it psychologically easier for them to kill. "Everyone else thinks that the whole program or the people behind it are a joke," says Brandon Bryant, a former drone camera operator who worked at Nellis Air Force Base, "that we are video-game warriors, that we're Nintendo warriors."
(Score: 2) by istartedi on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:18PM
What if they were deployed closer to the action? In theory being able to drive home after a shift is less stressful. This article makes it sound like it might be more stressful. The military has a pattern where you deploy away from home, you're at war for X number of months, then you're war-free. This on-again off-again system breaks that pattern.
If they can't justify deploying them closer to the action based on psych issues, maybe they argue that there's better network latency. What are round-trip ping times from the Mid-West to the Mid-East? They can't be that good.
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(Score: 3, Informative) by tibman on Wednesday June 17 2015, @08:34PM
250ms? very fast. But that is via ground. Because these use satellite it doesn't matter where the ground team is located. A signal to the satellite is like 35,000 km and the distance between the US and Iraq is like 12,000km. So even if the team was flying a drone within eyesight the signal must still round-trip over 60,000 km!
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(Score: 2) by looorg on Wednesday June 17 2015, @09:21PM
On the other hand you are firing a high explosive missile traveling above mach one and with a kill-radius of 15-20m so it's not like you have to hit them spot on to take them out. So some lag or latency might not matter all that much, plus buildings don't tend to move around much.
(Score: 2) by captain normal on Thursday June 18 2015, @04:16AM
Still at apx .2 sec return time, that's just a shade more than the reaction time a trained sniper has before he pulls the trigger. And the odds of anyone lobbing a mortar or returning fire from 35K clicks away is nil.
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(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2015, @12:03AM
What if they were deployed closer to the action? In theory being able to drive home after a shift is less stressful. This article makes it sound like it might be more stressful.
The problem isn't technical, it is psychological. So, no need to send them closer to the action. Just bundle them up on a 'virtual deployment' where they don't go home. Maybe ship them to a military base away from their home city, but otherwise just have them bunk on base. Do at least a solid month at a time, maybe more, between 'shore leave.'
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 18 2015, @06:42AM
They might even be better at recognizing the people, what they're doing and blow up fewer wedding parties by mistake.
But of course it does depend on what metrics you're using. Use the wrong ones and... ;).