Pilots maneuver aircraft by thought. Helmet-mounted heads-up displays project a virtual reality “soundscape” of the battlefield. Unmanned aircraft launch strike missions on enemy forces while small hand-held robots flit around war zones like gnats, projecting enemy movement back to command centers.
Once, such ideas were the stuff of futurist ponderings published in popular science and mechanics magazines. Today, Air Force scientists and others say the dreams of the future are only a few microchips away from reality.
But let’s scrap the idea of wildly fanciful but implausible artist renderings of bizarre aircraft flying on equally bizarre wingspans. Today’s aviation engineers, scientists and researchers are looking at ways to keep the current warplane inventory up and flying well into the latter part of the century. After all, when you’ve got such strange looking airframes as the B-2 Spirit bomber, F-117 Nighthawk stealth fighter and now the F/A-22 Raptor strike aircraft, fanciful designs of future aircraft are a bit of a waste of time.
“ We’re not looking at science fiction ideas here,” said Kristen Liggett, a crew systems engineer with the Air Force Research Laboratory’s human effectiveness systems interface division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio. “We’re talking science fact. What can we do to improve aircraft today, not 50 years from now?”
In other words, developers aren’t looking forward to a day when technology will catch up to imagination. Today, technology is waiting for imagination to do what it does best: Create.
In the cockpit
Most advanced avionics research in powered flight today falls into three areas: Integrating the pilot and the aircraft more comprehensively, aircraft design and function, and aircraft construction.
For generations of people raised on images of gallant fighter pilots using guts, instinct and a compass to fly and fight against airborne enemies, the concepts many researchers are developing are as cold and analytical as a computer on an iceberg. Forget Tom Cruise jockeying his F-14 Tomcat fighter like a cowboy on amphetamines. The aircraft of the not-so-future will take “seat of the pants” flying out of the cockpit.
“ Today’s cockpit is an information center,” Liggett said. “The pilot has to assess a massive input of data in seconds to determine a course of action. We need to make that process easier. Instinct and courage are still in the equation, but pilots today also have much more information than pilots from other generations could have dreamed.”
Helmet-mounted environment and targeting displays are old news in the advanced avionics world. Now engineers are working on ways to create three dimensional environments within the cockpit by using sound and visual techniques.
For example, Liggett’s team is working on a project that will create a “surround sound” effect in the cockpit. When a threat appears, instead of a single monotonous tone beeping from the cockpit display, the tone will come from speakers in the general direction of the threat. The tone will act as a kind of reverse homing beacon, giving the pilot an auditory sense of which direction to focus his or her attention.
Also, scientists are looking at advanced voice control aspects of the cockpit, where a pilot will simply tell the aircraft what to do. Other projects involve look-and-shoot targeting and intelligence-aiding upgrades.
“ To help the pilot do the job better, we look at ways to not only help with the physiological workload, but also the psychological workload,” Liggett said. “Technology gives us tremendous opportunity to maximize the pilot’s potential in the cockpit.”
Current research could also lead to the ultimate in pilot/aircraft cohesion: thought-controlled aircraft.
“ There are those looking at ‘brain control’ of the aircraft,” Liggett said. “A pilot flying a craft by thought. It’s not as far-fetched as it seems.”
Wings of the future
In October, the first operational F/A-22 landed at Tyndall Air Force Base, Fla., marking the official operational debut of the next generation of powered military aircraft for the Air Force.
