The modern fighter pilot is a battle manager - Forget stick and rudder - Curt Lewis

 

'Firefox'-Styled Neuro-Avionics Are Likely Still Decades Away

Fighter aircraft avionics have come so far, so fast that it's hard to realize that only a century ago, the first U.S. Army Air Corps was doing battle over northern France in open cockpits equipped with shockingly rudimentary controls. Today, fighters like Lockheed Martin's F-22 Raptor are so fully-equipped with advanced head-up display technologies that one wonders whether neuro-activated flight controls are just around the next cloud.

For now, however, such neuro-tech remains the realm of the 1982 Clint Eastwood film "Firefox," which features a fictional Soviet MiG-31 stealth aircraft that fires its weapons merely upon the pilot "thinking" such a command.

It's pretty likely that someone is working on something very similar, aviation historian Donald Nijboer, author of "Fighting Cockpits: In the Pilot's Seat of Great Military Aircraft from World War I to Today," tells me. But he says such advanced neuro-avionics are likely still decades away, even if it's debatable whether such tech would actually save time in the cockpit.

Despite uncertainty about the future of warplane avionics, Nijboer's new book offers a fascinating take on the development of such technology. With high-resolution color photos of more than 50 historic cockpits by photographer Dan Patterson, "Fighting Cockpits" successfully gives even a casual reader a real feel for what facing the elements, adversaries and crude technology actually meant for World War I-era pilots.

Wood-and-canvas open-cockpit planes like the Blériot XI cockpit "instrumentation" consisted of a watch and a map of the flight route rolled onto a scroll, a control stick, rudder pedals, and no throttle, Nijboer writes.

"All rotary engines were controlled by means of a "blip" switch, which had two settings: flat out or stopped," writes Nijboer. He notes that airspeed and altitude were left to the pilot's judgment. World War I dogfights subjected pilots to such extremely high G-forces, he writes, they caused blackouts, and in some severe cases burst blood vessels behind the eyes.

"Even when they began to add more controls and instruments later in the war, the pilots still relied more on what they felt through their hands and feet - the sound and smell of their engine and the slipstream on their face," said Nijboer.

Although today's fighter pilots are masters of their universe, they would likely struggle in a primitive World War I-era cockpit.

 

"A well-trained pilot of today would have his hands full trying to fly a World War I Sopwith Camel," said Nijboer.

What has surprised Nijboer most about the evolution of warplane cockpits?

"How the cockpit always seemed to be an afterthought in the design process," said Nijboer. "Most instruments and controls were placed where they could fit and not in any real logical or ergonomic order."

As Nijboer points out in his book, in the 1920s, as aviation horsepower increased so did cockpit instruments and controls for engine throttles, fuel mixtures, oxygen systems, and engine gauges.

These new cockpits were often at odds with the needs of the pilots; since logistics for the aircraft's various systems, writes Nijboer, were prioritized to mechanically-link the plane's vital systems.

"Most cockpits looked as if the instruments and controls had been tossed in to land where they may; forcing pilots to reach and blindly grope for poorly-placed controls," Nijboer writes.

It wasn't until the end of the decade, Nijboer writes, that fighter aircraft had enough instruments to "fly blind." In 1929, Lt. James "Jimmy" Doolittle of the U.S. Army Air Corps flew a Consolidated NY-2 Husky trainer - replete with a gyroscopic compass, an artificial horizon instrument, and a precision altimeter - to successfully perform the world's first "blind-flying takeoff and landing."

Most recently, Nijboer is a fan of the F-22 Raptor which made its combat debut just a couple of years back. With its heads-up display and six liquid crystal display (LCD) panels, the F-22 writes Nijboer, gives pilots a first-look, first-shoot, first-kill capability.

"Modern fighter pilots I spoke with described themselves as more battle managers than stick and rudder fighter jocks," said Nijboer. "These modern jets are designed for beyond visual range combat. There's little need for a tight-turning agile fighter."

The future of over-the-horizon tech in cockpits?

"Today's pilots are limited by how many Gs they can withstand before blacking out; it's around 9," said Nijboer. "In the future a single fighter pilot could control a squadron of drones capable of performing any number of maneuvers a human pilot could not."

Nijboer says neuro-technology research is already underway on hands-free tech to control fighter aircraft. I guess a neurological cockpit would be the ultimate, he says, but as an F-22 pilot told me "the Raptor can outsmart you, it's that good."

Such technology would surely boggle the minds of World War I-era pilots. But perhaps "Fighting Cockpits" is most impressive for reminding us that the continuing development of military aircraft technology may have paradoxically kept us out of a third world war.