It took the Air Force about 12 years to rack up the first quarter-million hours on its Predator unmanned aircraft and just 13 months to rack up the last quarter-million hours, Gen. Norton A. Schwartz told a Grand Forks audience Friday.
By 2013, the Air Force will have 35 times as many combat air patrols as it did in 2001, he said.
And that pace of expansion will continue to accelerate to where the Air Force will find it won't have enough airmen to continue the current one-pilot-to-one-aircraft model, he said.
The four-star general, who serves as the Air Force's chief of staff, its top military leader, is nothing if not bullish about the future of unmanned aircraft. He was keynote speaker Friday for the final day of the Unmanned Aircraft Systems Action Summit in Grand Forks, hosted by Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D.
Schwartz is the highest-ranking military official to speak at the conference, now in its fourth year. Previous generals to address the conference include a one-star and two two-stars.
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The biggest obstacles, as far as Schwartz is concerned, are the manpower requirements of unmanned aircraft and limited funding. The two are linked in that the Air Force can't afford to increase its manpower exponentially, and it's hard to fund programs to increase automation of unmanned aircraft so they don't require as many airmen to operate.
He's been so concerned about the manpower issue that he'd gotten the Air Force to change its official term for unmanned aircraft yet again to remotely piloted aircraft -- the military had earlier changed unmanned aerial vehicles to unmanned aircraft systems. The point was to remind everyone that "unmanned" aircraft require a lot of manpower, according to testimony he gave to the U.S. Senate's Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense a few weeks ago.
The manpower shortage has to do with several factors. The rapid ramp-up in the number of unmanned aircraft challenged the Air Force's ability to crank out new pilots for those aircraft. The service had to stop its practice of converting manned aircraft pilots to unmanned aircraft and just train unmanned aircraft pilots directly.
The sophistication of sensors on unmanned aircraft have grown so much that the raw intelligence generated threatens to swamp analysts and the people charged with disseminating that gathered intelligence.
The uses for unmanned aircraft have expanded, as well. Air Force unmanned aircraft have been called upon to provide damage assessments in major disasters, from New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, to the Red River Valley during the 2009 floods, to Haiti after this year's earthquake.
One solution to the manpower shortage, Schwartz said, is for one pilot to control a swarm of unmanned aircraft. Two years ago, when he visited the Port of Singapore, he said, he was amazed to see that one crane operator was running six cranes at once. "They worry about the first 4 feet and the last 4 feet," he said.
This means that the operator takes over each crane when the crane latch comes within four feet of a cargo container on a ship, lets the machine run automatically and then takes over again when the container is within 4 feet of the truck.
That's the model, Schwartz said, for unmanned aircraft.
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The model for dealing with the gush of data, he said, is also computer automation. The amount of data delivered by unmanned aircraft today, he said, should increase by 10 to 12 times.
Reach Tran at (701) 780-1248; (800) 477-6572, ext. 248; or send e-mail to ttran@gfherald.com .
