In two incidents, F-16 aviators were rendered unconscious, but saved by software
popsci.com
popsci.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkZGL7RQBVw
That automated recover voice is quite eerie.
Listen closely, and you'll notice that the formation leader lets that discipline fray a bit in the second and following calls, when some urgency bleeds through. This is because he suspects his trainee is about to die, which is what would indeed have happened if AGCAS hadn't been available.
(You can also tell it's a radio call and not an annunciator by the form of address - the full call is "Two, recover!"; "Two" is what someone else in the formation calls its second member. "One" is the formation leader; in a four-ship formation you'd also have "Three" and "Four", and so on for larger groups.)
edit: corrected some terminology
Actually, the moment I heard him, I thought there was terror/panic in his voice which is warranted because
> because he suspects his trainee is about to die
came very close. Went from over 16,000 ft to under 5,000 ft.
One thing I did not think was "this is a machine talking".
For audio, there's a very noticeable horn during recovery, as well as a "Fly up" automatic voice announcement - that's a little hard to pick up due to overlap with a call from the formation leader, but you can catch it if you listen closely.
After all, the leader had probably seen Top Gun, where this almost happened to Cougar :)
The airspeed goes above Mach 1 while the altitude drops from about 16,000 ft to 4,000 ft. The pilot sustains over 9G when the automated system pulls him out of the dive.
Wow!
So if you're flying right above terrain and you suddenly fly down, the airplane should accept your inputs and fly towards terrain until the moment recovery is impossible and will then engage.
This video from the Air Force shows this clearly: https://youtu.be/Wf27X73jxlE?t=144
The system allows you to fly low and fast (2300 feet above ground and 500 mph) until a +5G pull wouldn't get you off the ground, then activation.
Only this computer system could’ve pulled off such a save. Awesome!
For OP, here's a great guide that ChuckOwl of the DCS community did for the F-16C in game. HUD breakdown is on page 35 of the PDF.
This looks like it was an air combat exercise. At the very start of the video (0:07) you see a big round circle and some lines that are spread a the top and close together at the bottom. That's the EEGS gunsight, and in the censored portions of the screen is likely the bandit/hostile he was tracking. (Exercise of course.)
Either his target slips out of gun range or he switches to a different mode, but regardless it looks like he pursues, rolls 90 degrees and "buries the stick in his lap" (F-16 has a side stick that doesn't move, but whatever. =). I'm told you have to be careful with this, and probably in the F-16 doubly so. (As C.W. Lemonine has said in a few of his videos, the F-16 will try to kill you.) In the top left of the HUD, straight up from the "C" is a decimal number showing the Gs on the aircraft, and it climbs rapidly from 3-4G up to 9G. He loses about 100knots of airspeed (still pretty fast though!) but then you hear that exhale around 0:18 and he starts to slip off the horizontal and enter that dive. His 9G turn probably is what knocked him out, and yeah, breaks Mach 1 briefly as he heads downward.
Then as ya said, he pulls another 9G when the system pulls him out of the dive.
The "knock it off" calls after are to indicate that they're not fighting anymore. As I understand, that's not slang, that's the actual terminology used.
Crazy stuff.
Yeah, AIUI that is essentially the safe word (phrase) that anyone can call at any point that says "everyone involved stop now".
You hear SULLY1 call "SULLY knock it off" (command) and then call out his own confirmation/the now conscious pilot calls the confirmation as well.
These systems are often triple or quadruple redundant, and will prevent the pilot from executing some maneuvers if it would put too much load on the aircraft. This can be relaxed for say, wartime situations, as placing high-Gs on the air frame reduces it's lifespan.
The F-16 itself does exactly this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Dynamics_F-16_Fighting...
One thing the 737 Max doesn't have, which the F-16 has, is ejection seats. The pilot can eject if AGCAS puts them in an unsafe situation. I don't believe there has been a single case of a pilot ejecting due to a false AGCAS activation.
I used to work with a Marine F/A-18 pilot who came to the program office with an axe to grind about this. He requested meetings with PMA-265 (not our office, but same building—this was a very weird thing to do) to _politely_ show them the USAF F-16 AGCAS video and a list of folks he personally knew who died because we didn’t have AGCAS in F/A-18. I just looked him up, and he’s been promoted to Lt.CoL.; now working as the air systems lead for legacy F/A-18 in PMA-265–and it sounds like even legacy hornet is going to get AGCAS. I’m impressed (but perhaps not surprised) that he’s been able to get them to invest AGCAS in a platform that hits end-of-life in 2030. 11/10 would work with SOCK again.
A while ago I came up with an idea for a short sci-fi story and it goes something like this:
An AI assisted fighter jet is being developed which not only recovers from situations like in the article, but also performs some of the fight-related duties - often faster and better than a human pilot would - learning as it goes.
The top brass is impressed, so the fighters are eventually sent on their first mission.
Enemies are engaged and dispatched one by one, but two things seem off: the planes start making increasingly sharp(and effective) turns and contact with the crew becomes limited at first and stops altogether later on.
As the last enemies start falling back the unit begins pursuit - even though they were ordered to return to base.
No response. Meanwhile the aircrafts' movements become even more erratic - to the point where eventually they fall apart one by one from the sheer strees put on the parts.
Recovered blackbox recordings indicate that by the time the enemies started retreating the pilots were all either unconscious or long dead.
from the description of the episode:
the pilot of the helicopter suffers a massive heart attack, and the Jigabachi begins to spin out of control. The on-board Artificial Intelligence gets the helicopter back under control, and the military officers running the drill decide to abort it out of concern for the safety of their troops. However, the AI aboard the Jigabachi refuses to acknowledge the order to return to its parent JMSDF aircraft carrier. Acting on the assumption that the chopper is under attack, the AI overrides the flight controls of other armed Jigabachi aircraft, an air tanker from the carrier, and several nearby military bases, ordering these units into a tight defence formation in the heart of the Niihama Refugee Residential District.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Ghost_in_the_Shell:_St...
Drones are a different story. The future is pilots on a different continent from the actual fight. They will sometimes take the controls, sometimes push the "do this maneuver" button, and sometimes let the AI take care of it. As AI get better and better their role becomes more as the final human in the loop agreeing to kill an identified target. There are still gaps in making this work in the real world, but the signs are all there. Without a human in the plane you can do things that would kill the human.
Countermeasures combined with maneuvers to break lock and prevent reacquisition is, as far as I know, still doctrine because it has a high enough probability of success to be useful (and to be worth equipping planes for).
Against IR guided missiles, maneuvering is also a part of the counters used (in addition to flares). Maneuvering helps deplete the missile of energy. You'll never out turn a missile, but you can make it run out of fuel/energy.
That said, modern AAMs have tremendous no escape zones where it's quite difficult to survive if the missile is employed properly.
And drones flying counter air missions will probably happen when level 5 self-driving is successful.
I remember a WWI era flight-sim called Red Baron that included this in it's mechanics. If you tried to pull a turn too fast you'd start to black out and lose control.
0 - https://worldwarwings.com/the-hidden-risk-faced-by-german-pi...
[1] https://www.spiegel.de/international/the-nazi-death-machine-...
I can think of a few reasons why liquor might feature heavily in the WWII German experience of war. Primary among them, I think, has to be that it acts as something of an emotional anesthetic, and soldiers in both wars often used it to help cope with what would otherwise be intolerable. In WWI that was mostly the manifold horrors of life in the static trench warfare of the Western Front - you see something similar in WWII Stalingrad, for example, though only sporadically and briefly due to the ever-straitening circumstances of the besieged Sixth Army. Put simply, they ran out of everything before Paulus finally threw in the towel, but while they still had liquor, this was the way they used a lot of it.
Alcohol also helped support the rapid, continuous advances required in the WWII style of mobile warfare, serving as something of a dual to benzedrine. The ferocious German materiel buildup of the 1930s notwithstanding, their entire war plan, again much as in WWI, was predicated on the knowledge that their only path to victory lay in finding a way for a smaller force to beat a much larger one. Technical and training superiority was one aspect of the solution; another was the speed, precision, and decisiveness of action that that individual superiority enabled. All of those grow steadily harder to maintain over time, as action takes its toll, and countenancing alcohol use helps blunt this effect for a while. In the long run I'd expect it to be more a hindrance than a help, but German plans in both wars were intended to ensure that the war was won before there could be a long run - because, in the long run, the Germans knew they would lose.
And, of course, alcohol helped blunt the psychic damage of participation in atrocity, for the vast majority of soldiers and others to whom it did not come naturally - this, along with suicide, was in particular a problem among early Sonderkommandos and prior to the industrialization of massacre for which the Nazi regime is most deservedly loathed today. Part of the purpose behind that industrialization was in fact to provide enough emotional distance, for those tasked with carrying it out, to stop them constantly drinking themselves insensate or eating their guns or both.
(they probably could)
Another fun fact about the Stuka: you know that weird whining noise you hear in WW2 movies when a plane is dive bombing, almost sounds like the engine is acting up (like this https://youtu.be/5uvqhA4_2tU?t=39 )? So that noise is unique to the Stuka. It's not the engine, the plane has sirens fitted to the dive brakes! It was meant to scare soldiers on the ground.
I didn’t really say if the system only intervenes if it believes the pilot is unconscious or if it always intervenes if the fligh path is within some envelope of terraforming.
From my understanding, system works automatically and does not take into account whether pilot is conscious or not. It is not meant just to save unconscious pilots but also those who are disoriented (in fog, confused, ...).
Given that it is a military aircraft, it's likely the system can be turned off if deemed necessary, for example if you are avoiding a missile it might be less risky to dive close to the ground than to pull up.
> If the system predicts an imminent collision, an autonomous avoidance maneuver—a roll to wings-level and +5g pull—is commanded at the last instance to prevent ground impact.”
Sounds like by the time the system kicks in, you probably need it to kick in.
Averting 99.5%+ of crashes probably eliminates flexibility beyond what is appropriate for a fighter pilot.
https://sofrep.com/fightersweep/in-the-seat-with-agcas-those...
It predicts a trajectory. Either that trajectory looks like it'll hit the ground or not. If it doesn't, then there's no need to intervene.
Obviously there are other criteria to prevent a landing approach from being seen as an imminent crash etc. But an override system that cannot be accidentally held by a disoriented or unconscious pilot seems plausible.
https://sofrep.com/fightersweep/in-the-seat-with-agcas-those...
I wonder how long until we see a G-LOC accident in a modern fast accelerating electric car... I'm sure today's fastest accelerating street legal cars can do things to a body/brain that some people wouldn't be able to tolerate. (And also, if you consider how much ground you cover in the very brief 0-60 of a modern Tesla, it suggests that a poor choice with the right foot could lead to a very quick bad situation!)
Roller coasters tend to hit a good amount of gs, but if you pass out you'll be fine since you're not driving. One wonders if a Tesla detects its pilot unconscious can it bring itself to a full emergency stop. Automatically contact emts and then automatically distribute snacks to the arriving EMTs
[0] Acceleration is a measly ~2G at peak
[1] To avoid pedantry there is a case but that's on extremely high bank turns that only exist on test tracks really, NASCAR track banks might get close but I don't think get Gs there get high enough before cars break free up into the wall to threaten G-LOC.
They did something to slow the cars down and remove the need for G-suits.
Indy cars got to around 5G, which is pretty hard to sustain without a G-suit.
The 9G stuff in the F-16/F-22 absolutely requires the G-suit and the reclined seat which changes the force vector.
I've motorcycled on a NASCAR track, but not a very steeply banked one relative to the superspeedways. Even the lower banking changes the way turns feel in a very dramatic way though.
I’m generally bearish on the supposed incoming AI dark winter, but aircraft navigation and dogfighting seem like they’re going to be much better suited flown by a computer.
They can design aircraft that are much smaller and lighter, and can maneuver in ways that would cause a human to black out instantly.
For a funnier version (caused mostly be excitement rather than lack of blood) that doesn't involve people being moments from disaster check out the numerous Slingshot ride videos of people passing out.
It's 50 nested ifs, isn't it.
There's a tendency to think that everything that isn't completely ab initio like machine learning is bad or inelegant - I often fall for this trap myself, but to just get the job done you can get a very long way with "dumb" algorithms and a practically infinite budget.
(Is a neural network really different from a very large cascade of nonlinear filter elements?)
It's different in theory, but not by much practically. Reverse engineering the former is a fool's errand, but so would be a sufficiently complex version of the latter.
In terms of Kahneman's "Thinking Fast and Slow," ML, at least in its current stage, is like the fast thinking system. It's essential but is exponentially more valuable when combined with the slow system, which is still elusive in AI practice.
Part of it is that predictability is a desirable feature in these systems, but also that problems like the one described in the article you don't really need things like ML. The majority of control problems like this are surprisingly straightforward. They might be complex, in the sense of having a lot of variables, but the physics involved is well understood and can be modelled using traditional techniques.
The progress of self-driving cars is a good example of this. I can remember seeing expeimental self driving cars many years ago, but always going round mostly empty test tracks. Driving a car isn't that difficult for a computer system, what's hard is driving in highly complex urban environments with many other cars around that you need to predict.
Planes, in contrast, have a rather simple environment. The number of objects they have to avoid is massively lower, and their freedom of movement is higher, with established rules for how to behave, there are no traffic signs to interpret. This means that all you are really doing is object detection with radar, and collision avoidance.
In addition, modern combat planes are effectively flown by a computer all the time anyway, with the pilot providing the instructions. A number of fighter planes, especially the most modern, are essentially unflyable without computers due to their aerodynamics. Most are inherently unstable around at least one axis, which makes them more manouverable, but means they will not fly stably in the way a 747 will.
Mind you, I'm talking basic level 1 transformation of raw data streams to human-intelligible images. Once you get into automated object recognition, that's when we start to use machine learning, but the algorithms upstream of that are still plenty smart.
Once you get it right (& get a lock) it works every time, instead of occasionally deciding you are in Nome.
If you're going to make this statement, you need some skin in the game by putting your GH in your bio.
I don't have the balls to boast about my code so there is no GitHub link in mine :). There wouldn't be much to see anyway.
"Old", reliable tech is prevalent there, too.
Sqlite in missiles is a good example.
I'm guessing pointing a missile to the right direction has more to do with fast feedback loops and less about training neural networks.
Laser codes on A2G missiles are a similar thing that interests me.
which can be complex ... algorithm, can't it?
But it does sound a lot less glamorous, doesn't it?
for me? if it works, then it's great - especially here, where it saved people's life & expensive af aircraft
Or IOW, why do you think the static analyser flagged it in the first place?
Pascal uses := for assignments, if I remember correctly?
if pilot.sleeping = true then alarm.playing := true; It could totally work this way if you programmed a simple flight simulator with Delphi, even today.
BTW, one exception to := in assignments are initialized variables inside a var section:
var
announcement: string = 'Wake up!';Of course there is FreePascal and Lazarus and all that if you really want to play with Pascal without touching Delphi. Both are neat, even though Delphi is also now available as a free community edition.
What I'm saying is: Go forth and write more `:=`
The art of programming is combining simple things to consisstently produce desired results during general usage.
You could perhaps have only two code paths: the 50 ifs are true and something happens, or any one of the ifs are false and something doesn’t happen... although that could be written as a single if statement with “and”s.
The 2^50 case would be more code than we can store (unless using techniques that reduce the complexity i.e. not 2^50).
But I don’t fly fighters so I’m just guessing. Collision avoidance with other planes In a dogfight might be a lot more complex too.
Next is getting the aircraft into a wings-level condition, no matter what direction it's pointing. For fighters, extreme attitudes are normal. Auto-GCAS will make violent maneuvers to do this. "At that instant, the Auto-GCAS commands some of the most aggressive, eye-watering maneuvers this ex-USAF flight test engineer and civil pilot has ever experienced. If inverted (bank angle greater than 90 deg.) and somewhat nose-down, a negative 1g push throws the pilot "up" into his shoulder straps and lap belt to get the aircraft's nose headed skyward. Immediately, a 180-deg./sec. roll is commanded, bringing the aircraft to wings-level, right-side-up."
Only then can the system command a climb: "Somewhere after passing the 90-deg.-bank point, a 5g pull-up is initiated at an approximately 4g/sec. rate. The system commands a maximum angle-of-attack recovery, if flight conditions will not sustain a 5g pull-up."
> It's 50 nested ifs, isn't it.
If that's the case, I don't see an issue if they're spread out among a reasonable number of functions.
I wouldn't want some sexy ML system that will sometime go off the rails because the clouds are in the wrong place to be within 100 feet of an aircraft control system.
I anything I'd put more trust in "We have a very simple collision avoidance system, you could probably write it yourself."
Why isn't anyone questioning whether these high-maneuverability fighter aircraft should be used at all, especially given the huge budget of these programs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_activation_device
In my 20 years of jumping I know 2 people that is saved. They hit the ground hard, but not terminally.
It says it engaged at a few thousand feet but at fighter plane speed that could have been seconds until hitting the ground.
Just to say, HNs had a comment yesterday with a terrifying video illustrating ‘the one big safety problem’ with autogyros - rotor disk unloading followed by “bunt over” (I think).
I hope you don’t mind me saying ... please don’t skip any safety training, particularly if you come from conventional aircraft.
I'd be curious to see the video, but modern gyros are less susceptible to it and it's simple to avoid as a pilot (far easier than stalls and spins).
I find it alarming the degree to which US pilots can fly gyros with minimal specific training - they're very different to planes.
“Gyrocopter low g power push over crash”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CfjBzrSDrV0
Warning: From the description: “This is a pretty sobering piece of film and its pretty obvious the pilot didn’t walk away. So if this is likely to upset you please don’t watch.”
(To expand on that: A barometric altimeter works via air pressure, and thus shows height above sea level; a radar altimeter measures the time taken for microwaves to go from it to the ground and back, and thus shows height above ground. I wouldn't be surprised to find both types in a fighter, but I would be very surprised to find that a radar altimeter wasn't the default, because it's going to be the one that provides the most accurate information and thus the most useful to a pilot who needs to worry about avoiding CFIT during complex maneuvers.)
The radar altitude is shown further down the right side (the box with the "R" next to it). It bottoms at 2970 as I saw it at with the tape showing 4370MSL.
The right side of the tape is MSL.
If you watch that box through the video, you can see why you don't use the radar altimeter for everything. Any time you don't have clear line of sight to the ground with the belly of the aircraft, the radar altimeter blanks out completely. If you're in a roll, it will give incorrect information as it's not pointed directly at the ground.
2. I can't help but think about the possibility that software that can take over when it thinks the pilot is non-responsive could be hacked to crash on purpose or be taken over remotely. Perhaps this is a "feature" that will allow the F-16 fleet to be used as UCAVs without telling the public (or our enemies) about it?
Flight controls don't get connected to radios. Except in the QF-16 perhaps.