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Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Why do I get the feeling that the market shifted beneath their feet to drones and these old aircraft companies are using "loyal wingman" to make a half-hearted half-way play between old/new products to stay relevant, which just buys them time to keep selling expensive jets... until pure drone upstarts start eating their lunch.

Like when Blackberry tried to make BlackBerry Storm after iPhone and Blockbuster tried to make Blockbuster Online after Netflix.

Technology shifts rarely wait for these stodgy middle ground transitionary products to find a market.

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Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.

The real question is basically - is full autonomy both technically possible and culturally/politically acceptable within 5, 10, or 20 years? Because full autonomy isn't really ready now (or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war). And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

Because no one knows that answer, everyone (governments, militaries, manufacturers) is hedging, and CCA is part of that hedge.

I think we are underestimating and/or forgetting that the enemy gets a vote, and remote piloting something from Virginia all the way out to Japan or Korea or Taiwan involves many signals integrity steps along the way. This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.

>or else we wouldn't need hundreds to thousands of drone operators in the Ukraine war

I don't think this is the reason the systems are not fully autonomous right now ("fully autonomous" here meaning that they can complete the kill chain independently, no HITL). Even if we assume it true that the drones are not "good enough" to be at parity with a human operator, if you had an essentially limitless amount of them, would you really waste the manpower on operating them in FPV mode? You would not, you would completely saturate the battlefield with them. Thus, as it was in the beforetimes and ever shall be, logistics wins wars.

The reason that FPV drones are so easily disrupted is that they are too light to carry anything more than a radio and fly low.

Disrupting the signal for a normal-sized aircraft is much harder. If you're flying at 10s of thousands of feet and have a line of sight to multiple satellites it's going to take some serious weaponry to disrupt that.

True. But the next rung up the escalation ladder is of course disrupting the satellites.

I envision them all gone seconds into any large scale war.

The G forces are another thing. I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead.

Sure, winged flight has uses, but taking a missle platform, adding small munitions instead of a big bang?

I'm not sure about this. Space is big and these satellite constellations are getting very large, with lots of redundancy. I know I'm sort of arguing against my previous point, but bear with me for a sec. You'd need an anti-satellite system that either destroys them kinetically (accepting the cost of the debris field) or one that breaks them electronically (an EMP or another device that defeats them electronically). The United States' underlying philosophy on advanced weapons has, for a long time, been precision so I could see the emergence of in-orbit interception & defeat/disable platforms. But you'd need a lot of them for the doctrine to be effective, which means a lot of mass-to-orbit logistics. Adversaries do not have this, so I would expect e.g. PRC to have an alternate strategy of rendering entire orbits unusable or dangerous, which I think is easier.

Regarding your missile platform question, there are several companies that already manufacturing loitering munitions, and long-range loitering cruise missiles are on the roadmap, so to speak.

Interesting point re: satellites, I'd say the best tactic here is to presume all gone immediately. Eg, from a planning perspective. The reality may be that the war may need to stretch out a bit, before action is taken.

Of course any planned action would likely try to strike first, by some means.

If I look back on how the Ukraine War progressed, it's a little more nuanced than that. Basically, your advanced weapons, of which supply is limited or constrained in some manner, are all on the clock and have an unknown expiration date. This means that your plans need to assume this, and it makes sense at the strategic level to try to take time off of the enemy's clock, if that makes sense.

In practice I think this would look something like immediate launch of satellite interceptor spacecraft after a formal war kicks off, so the clock in this case is probably measured in days. If we already have these kinds of interceptors, and I think there's good reason to believe that the Americans have at least a few, then the clock probably has only 48-72 hours after launch on it before the enemy satellite network starts to see noticeable degradation. Returning this point to the original comment of mine in this thread, you would likely have only a few days to a week where you could continuously "pilot" these kinds of aircraft with a human operator before you'd need a fully autonomous system to at least supplement if not fully replace decision-making. Hope that makes sense, first time I've actually thought through how I would plan this if I was doing so in real life. I'm making a ton of assumptions here ... one of which is that the Americans, in this hypothetical, would have a highly accurate map of enemy satellite networks and their orbits (there's good reason to think this is true). Another is that the interceptor spacecraft are a) available (defined as either already in orbit or able to be quickly mated with a launch rocket), b) numerous enough that they can make an impact on a time horizon that matters, and c) that the enemy lacks the means to either intercept the interceptor spacecraft or maneuver their own satellites to make the interception itself difficult (or impossible, if you get the interceptor to burn enough DV that it can't continue mission).

> I wonder why they aren't stsrting wth missle platforms instead

Price and ease of manufacture. Missiles are expensive and hard to build.

Latest FPV drones in Ukraine became much more resistant to electronic countermeasures. Plus other drones are used as retranslators.

Seems they are using kilometers of fibre optic cables, so they fly tethered and communication can't be disrupted.

I'd hate to be part of the clean-up crew when that war ends. Broken fibre is nasty stuff.

I believe they’ve also deployed hybrid solutions: FPV fibre drones launched and piloted via link to an unmanned platform.

So a drone boat with good/secure signalling pulls up and a bunch of fibre optic drones launch from that point penetrating inland.

I'll gladly take up the fibre clean up. You deal with the mines :)

> This is to say that you should assume these signals are interrupted and you will not be able to maintain continuous control of the aircraft from whatever datacenter box the "pilot" sits in. That means fully autonomous decision making, functionally for the entire journey, and independent release authorization.

Only if every mission is absolutely critical. If disruptions are rare then you don't need autonomy.

Or more interestingly with the low-earth sat/data network. Seeing as projectssuch as starlink are basically mil in nature with a side of barely profitable civilian use. The whole data centers in space makes more sense. These are not for running cat blogs and video streaming , which is waht they are/will be marketed as. Realworld application will always be a command and control node spanning the globe for the mil use. And as its rolloed out globally can basically provide jammingfree links for the autonomous commands from space.

How do you defend them?

FPV drones cannot have powerful GPU yet to enable truly autonomous flight. And the issue is not only weight/energy restrictions, but also cost.

Autonomous flight is significantly easier than autonomous driving. You just fly between points in space, and there's nothing but air inbetween. The ground control handles most of collision avoidance, and if that's not available, it's easily achieved by moving 300ft/100m up or down.

True, but take into account that plants need to be able to fly/fight with instruments only and without vision.

Also dogfights are much rarer now, most people just fling rockets at each other (so you know how much these cost, a b200 seems cheap in comparison)

You don't need a super powerful GPU to do computer vision. There are cheap small devices that can do it.

>Roughly everyone expects the 6th generation fighters (the ones currently in development like F-47) to be the last manned generation. Most observers expect many/most 6th gen fighters to become optionally manned within their life span.

The said that about the 5th though. Like I've personally talked to people who were actively working on the F35 and they were saying "last manned aircraft" in like 2011ish.

I expect autonomy to be a long steady improvement of taking on additional subroutines of increasing complexity of decisions being made along the way. Fly here, land there, kill that, go over there without being detected, etc, etc, until humans are making only a select set of decisions that will probably be randomly sprinkled at the high and low levels.

Kind of like how when we build a brick wall the "vision" and the actual laying of bricks still get done by human but all the intermediary steps are drudgery that can be trivially automated (not to say they are all automated, just that they could be if labor $$ vs software $$ penciled out that way)

Yeah, I remember thinking that about the 5th gen myself. But I think part of that way unclarity around when the 6th gen would appear. 2011ish would be a weird timeframe.

Obama didn't announce the "pivot to Asia" until 2012. A lot of the world was still believing in the whole unipolar moment thing. The F-35 hadn't even started training squadrons in service yet. 6th generation probably felt really far away. 2016 onwards has been a major acceleration in all sorts of ways.

In my eyes, 6th generation was really ignited by the focus on China. The PCA/NGAD/F-47 was first out the gate, and really set the tempo and got everyone else going.

I agree with your estimation of the likely development path. I expect that approach to merge/converge from the other direction - I expect there to also be a parallel path of fully autonomous systems growing to occupy ever greater mission sets. Imagine telling a drone "I need an ELINT mission in the area and timeframe" (and it plans its own launch time, flight route, calculates fuel loads, communicates with ground staff), or "I need you to airdrop this supply pallet".

I don't think there's a way that the 6th generation will be manned.

> And at least the USAF doesn't think remote control will let them do what they need (which is to fly from Japan to Korea or Taiwan, or Philippines to Taiwan, and contest/control the skies in the face of a basically peer adversary).

I mean, they wouldn't think that, would they? It would put their pilots out of a job. But most flying has been done by autopilot long before AI, and even if/when you need a human in the loop, why would you want to put that human in the cockpit rather than safely in Virginia?

Manned-Unmanned teaming is not a new concept created in the last couple months to placate fighter pilots in the age of ai. With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.

If you can outsource the radar on a jet it is not a huge leap in logic to put the very hot missiles onto a unmanned aircraft. All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US

> With 5th generation fighter using datalink they to use the active radar in far away AWAC planes for targeting so the stealth fighter can get closer to the enemy without breaking cover by turning on active radar.

What benefit does a human pilot offer in this case? Are going to be using their eyes to track their location or see a Chinese fighter jet launching a standoff antiair missile at them? Drones can do AWACS and deep sensor roles, with a pilot and sensor operators far away from the planes.

> All of these concepts where written up 20 years ago by both china and the US

Defense contractors and the gov planners are often the same group of people, the same small community, there's not that many vendors. They show up at defence trade shows and see what industry is offering them. They tend to stick with the same big safe companies that change slowly. Bold ideas are infrequent. The smaller countries can take those risks easier than America.

My read is that the "loyal wingman" thing is a ploy to get around all the pilots / expilots in Air Force brass who might otherwise gatekeep anything they think is a threat to the careers of human pilots. These people want the Air Force to be about hotshots flying planes; this is part of the reason the US spun off the space stuff, because Air Force brass is institutionally incapable of taking anything other than manned flight seriously.

Really loyal wingmen are just an extension of jets.

Ultimately a carrier strike group could achieve many of the missions a F35 can through cruise missiles, ballistic missiles etc.

What an F35 provides is a sensory platform deep into enemy airspace.

But with the F35 being very expensive, and required to stay silent in RF to maintain stealth it's further desirable to have a loyal wingman out there.

The whole thing becomes one large sensor network with th added weapons.

It makes most sense in a near adversary situation and as it stands that particular scenario is why the F22 is not exported.

mistakes in A/A combat can have serious repercussions. not only loss of expensive air vehicles, but things like civilian airliners.

'loyal wingman' gives the kill / no kill decision to an Air Force officer. And having the decision maker geographically close eliminates jamming, delays, and the requirements to have a satellite infrastructure (like is required for Predator UAV's).

i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

> i hope we never assign a piece of code, AI or not, to be the decision maker.

This is already a past station, just not at Airbus.

> just not at Airbus

Airbus has publicized that it is working on a Project Maven style project with France's DGA [0][1].

Thales also publicly launched and demonstrated SkyDefender a couple days ago [2].

Mistral AI also announced in January 2026 that it is working with the DGA to productionize it's models for military applications [3] - ironically similar in manner to how the DoD was using Claude but is now using Gemini and GPT.

No country is going to leave networked, autonomous offensive and defensive capabilities on the table.

[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/airbus-wi...

[1] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/defence/ai...

[2] - https://www.janes.com/osint-insights/defence-news/air/thales...

[3] - https://www.linkedin.com/posts/marjorietoucas_were-happy-to-...

Yes, we are ~4-5 years into AI kill-chains now, though maybe only 1-3 with full autonomy.

You haven't been paying attention. We are at least 47 years into AI kill chains.

https://www.vp4association.com/aircraft-information-2/32-2/m...

That's not really what they meant. They meant that the weapon is guided by software that decides which targets to pick and autonomously makes that decision without a human in the loop. The device seeks you instead of you going to it.

A landmine has no friend-or-foe-or-noncombatant decision engine, it will kill you or maim you just like it will kill or maim the guy that laid it or any other passer by.

You missed the point. The Mk 60 Captor is not a "land" mine. It is guided by software and autonomously makes the decision to launch a homing torpedo without a human in the loop.

A homing torpedo/release mechanism is not AI by the normal definition of the word. You're welcome to redefine words as much as you want but it's a bit silly. We also don't use that term for heatseekers or for line followers.

The 'signature' bit is interesting, but I'd still not label that AI, and neither does anybody else. It is a loitering munition, I'll give you that, and I think that that brings it closer to the 'mine' definition of things than the 'AI killbot'.

It's odd how some people now think the term "AI" only applies to LLMs. I guess they're just ignorant of computing history.

https://www.cnas.org/publications/reports/proposed-dod-princ...

No, it obviously does not only apply to LLMs. It just does not apply to loitering munitions from decades ago. And I'm pretty sure nobody ever labeled that thing AI before you did.

Those don't self launch.

I'm talking about systems that classify thousands of targets at once and can self-launch. Computerized kill chain.

Those self launch. Did you even read the article?

I understand the point you are trying to make here.

But to be very clear, the mine still has to be placed. What's happening now is that step is also automated, and may be automated by a system controlling many other weapons at the same time, across land/sea/air.

It's not remotely the same thing in terms of the scope and scale of what is being done with the networked weapon systems.

Maybe if you tied several hundred of them together with different weapon effects, sensors and capabilities operating across thousands of km at once you would start to get close.

I'm talking about weapon systems that know what color clothes the target is wearing and where his kids go to school.

You know the statement that the "network is the computer"?

Same applies here. We've connected sensors and weapon systems and LLMs together with data sources.

Drones doesn't automatically mean no pilot or no human in the loop. Motherships and relays to command centers solve nearly everything loyal wingman offers. The only question is data access (which is still a major issue in manned jets operating in EW conditions far from home).

Same with the idea that drones can't have high end radars and other stuff which requires a fancy human jet in the loop. Decidated single purpose drones with high end sensors can solve a similar purpose with a much lower risk and cost.

Those low-cost drones are just a fad. Fiber optic TV guided exploding thing is literally the oldest kind of anti-tank missiles. Russian winged cruise missiles are even older, early cold war kinds of stuff. It just so happens that none of Ukraine, Russia, Iran etc has air dominance nor proper war time production capacities, and so they must resort to substituting military equipment with remixes of AliExpress stuffs.

Just in the invasion in Iran we all saw Apache handling drones with ease. They can probably put on the minigun or even microgun on an MQ-9, which is a drone, but not like the ones discussed here. Or someone might realize a turret on a Super Tucano is cheaper than the Reaper ground control trailer. My point is, Ukraine and Russia throwing drones at each others is not a sure sign that that's the war of the future.

The war in Iran proves the opposite: It is actually the future. The US could easily establish air dominance over Iran, yet it can't stop their military from launching smaller drones both in the air and at sea. The Strait of Hormuz is effectively closed and air power alone seems unlikely to fix the situation. If you want to effectively eliminate an opponent nowadays you need an army of drones - the economics don't work out if you are only fielding expensive ships, planes and missiles. And regarding your point that an Apache can easily shoot down a drone: Roughly 9/10 drones in the Russia Ukraine frontline get shot down and the remaining 10% make up for about 80% of the casualties (rest being mostly artillery and mines).

Right - the relative cost matters very much.

A Shahed drone costs $20K each. The Patriot missile interceptor costs $4 Mil each.

And the inevitable result is that the interceptors run out first

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-war-israel-tells-us-...

https://www.economist.com/international/2026/03/13/gulf-stat...

https://bsky.app/profile/mekka.mekka-tech.com/post/3mgrvx5gr...

The only lasting solution to low-cost drone attacks is low-cost defences. Ukraine knows this. The US apparently does not yet. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/10/what-are-the-ukrain...

But the end result is not "low-cost drones are just a fad." it's drones vs. more drones vs. yet more drones.

Exactly. "An Apache can shoot down a drone" is like "Tiger tanks were better than Shermans": the relative numbers of each matter.

One argument is that fighter airplanes are becoming more like airborne control centers than actual fighters. You don't get the same level of situational awareness from a remote controlled drone camera than from inside a cockpit. And if you look at the F-35, what is often put forward is its stealth and communication capabilities. Radars, electronic warfare, etc... that's what's important, and yes, having a human in the loop is important too. These planes can dogfight too, but ideally, they shouldn't, but they still have to be able to defend themselves when things go wrong.

Drones like they have in Ukraine are more like cheap missiles, they don't compete against fighter jets, and they can't do anything to them once they have taken off.

You expect drones to replace civil passenger aircraft any time soon?

I think GP's point is more relevant than your question implies. The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now. (I'm not close enough to the aviation industry to make a confident guess, but +90% wouldn't surprise me.) Humans are there to take (decision or control) over when something goes off the happy path - in fact, pilots are encouraged / required to hand-fly landings that could be done automatically in order to keep their skills current. Obviously no one would accept even a 0.01% crash rate for civilian flights, so we're many orders of magnitude of improvement away from replacing pilots in that sector.

Military calculations are very different. Every military asset - most definitely including humans - is disposable, and all wars are (in some dimension) wars of attrition. Holding mission success constant, when the cost x capability x ability to manufacture for autonomous platforms becomes cheaper than all that plus training / replacement cost of human pilots, then human pilots will disappear. The logic of war being what it is, I expect HITL decision-making to very quickly be dropped as soon as it is seen to be retarding the progress of a cheaper option.

> The vast majority of civilian flights could be flown entirely autonomously right now.

This is extremely dependent on your definition of "autonomously" because at the moment they are not at all approaching autonomy.

At best, they'd be automatic, in the most rote way.

That's true. It'd be more accurate to say that the planes are capable, but that a lot about how the air transport system is organized would have to change to take full advantage of that - which we don't want/need to do, because an "automatic" system is too brittle, so we'd want skilled pilots on board, anyway.

That is why I was talking about civil aircraft. With the waiting list for those aircraft Airbus can stay relevant for a very long time.

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