“Zen was big on any program at Dreamland that could help skilled pilots become better aviators,” Patrick said. That was most evident in Zen’s own case — he’d lost the use of his legs in a training exercise at Dreamland. “The system sends neural images to the wearer’s brain, so he ‘sees’ all sorts of images transmitted to him — TV cameras, sensor images, text messages, computer data, any number of things — just as if the optic nerve were sending electrical signals from the eye to the brain.
“The problem we always had with ANTARES was we were trying to design a system that could control an entire aircraft by thought,” Patrick went on. “Piping visual, sensory, or data images to the brain is a relatively simple task — it doesn’t require any specialized theta-alpha training. So instead of using heads-up displays or fancy holograms to replicate an airplane cockpit, we just pipe datalinked images directly to the brain. The user can control which images he sees with ease — as quickly and easily as thinking about what you want to see. And everything stays simple if we eliminated the need to control the aircraft with ANTARES.”
Daren donned the special headset again, and a few moments later the images returned. He could swivel his head and look all around the airfield. When he centered the crosshairs on a target such as the hangars on the other side of the runway, he got an exact range and bearing readout. When he turned his head to follow the flashing pointers, he found himself looking at a wooden box about ten feet square, exactly 425 meters away. “What am I looking at?” Daren asked.
“Some targets we set up south of the field.”
“Where is the camera?”
“You’re looking at what Sergeant Wilde was looking at.”
“The big guy with the electronic armor and rail gun?”
McLanahan nodded. “The computer stores what he’s already looked at in image files; when you tap in to his visual system, you can look at the latest stored image files that he’s sent, as if you’re looking at them yourself. You can look at what he’s looking at in real time, too, but he can control that.”
“Cool. How do I stop it?” But as soon as he thought about not looking at the image, it stopped, and he was again looking at the interior of the virtual-cockpit trailer. “Hey, I switched it! Very cool!” Daren switched the image back and forth with ease. “That works great. But what’s the purpose?”
“Switch back to the virtual image.” Daren did it in an instant. “Look at the target box. Got it?”
“Yep.”
“Designate it as a target.”
“How do I…?” But again, as soon as he thought about doing it, the crosshairs blinked three times, and then a red triangle appeared superimposed on the box. “Aha! Got it.”
“You’ve got a FlightHawk airborne with mini-Mavericks on board,” Patrick told him. “Attack that target.” This time it was simple: He thought about attacking the target, and a voice in his head announced, “Attack ground target, stop attack.”
“Why did it say ‘stop attack’?”
“That’s the command you’d issue to stop the attack,” McLanahan explained. He turned to a computer terminal beside him and verified that the original problem still existed — and sure enough, it did. “But here’s where the problem comes in: The satellite datalink is messed up. The FlightHawk is either not receiving the command or receiving it but not executing it. We had the same problem with an operational test a few weeks ago. We couldn’t get it to respond until we established a direct UCAV-to-aircraft link.”
“Very cool — commanding a FlightHawk from guys on the ground using this virtual mind-link thing,” Daren commented. “It’s a pretty sophisticated routine — lots of data shooting back and forth over very long distances.”
“But you did it with Global Hawk all the time, right?”
“Well… we don’t actually fly a Global Hawk unmanned recon plane from the ground, sir,” Daren pointed out. “It has to have a flight plan loaded in memory first. We can make lots of changes to that flight plan, but it has to have the flight plan first.”
“I want to be able to fly the UCAV, Daren,” Patrick said. “I understand what you’re saying about Global Hawk, but the ability to keep the man in the loop is important to any attack mission. Besides, we still have to be able to manually control the plane for certain phases of flight.”
“Which phases, sir? Certainly not flying straight and level?”
“How about a rendezvous with another aircraft?”
“As in refuel a FlightHawk from a tanker?”
“How about fly one right up inside the bomb bay of a B-1 bomber?”
“A B-1 bomber!” Daren exclaimed. His eyes widened in surprise, but then he shrugged. “Why not? I think you have the technology to do that right now. A computer the size of my wristwatch can fly a B-1 better than any pilot I’ve ever known.” He paused for a moment, then said, “We can do it one better, sir.”
“How?”
“Why don’t you fly both the FlightHawk and the B-1 bomber—right from the VC.”
“Make the carrier aircraft and the attack aircraft unmanned?”
“Why not?” Daren Mace asked. “I know you can already monitor and control most every system aboard the B-1 from the virtual cockpit. It wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to make the Vampire fly itself.”
“But why are we interested in making the carrier aircraft unmanned?” Patrick asked. He already had some answers himself, but he wanted to hear Daren’s reasoning.
“I have a feeling I’m preaching to the choir, sir, but here goes,” Daren said. “First: cost savings. Conventional wisdom holds that the cost to train and keep crew members in an aircraft like the B-1 bomber exceeds the cost of the aircraft by a factor of ten over its service life. Make the planes unmanned, run by computers, and now you don’t need rated officers to fly them anymore — technicians can monitor the computer systems, and technicians and intelligence experts can pick targets to attack.
“Second: Removing the human-necessary systems in the plane would really create huge savings in weight, system complexity, performance, electrical load, and dozens of other areas,” Mace went on. “The weight of an ejection seat with all its associated systems and plumbing is five times the weight of the guy that sits in the seat. We wouldn’t need to sap bleed air from the engines for pressurizing the cockpit — that would boost available engine power by at least twenty percent, maybe more. We’d have enough surplus electrical power on board to install newer, faster computers just by not having to illuminate the crew compartment.
“Third: Missions wouldn’t be restricted by the humans,” Daren concluded. “Even with backup crews on board, you can’t simply keep refueling a plane and keep it aloft for days and days — eventually the crew has to land the plane and get out. You can keep a robot plane on station for days, even weeks. You do away with crew rest requirements, you don’t waste flight time by doing crew-proficiency tasks, and you don’t need to provide for flight crews on mobility or deployment. And obviously we’re not risking any human crew members in high-risk missions.”
“We just have to make it work, then sell the gear and those arguments to the Pentagon.”