Drones could be key to solving one of the US Air Force’s biggest training challenges

WASHINGTON: For years, the US Air Force has struggled to figure out how to use a modest training budget to teach fighter pilots to battle large numbers of advanced aircraft. Now the service is seeing whether the answer could lie in the previously untapped potential of drones.

The Air Force has awarded North Carolina-based Blue Force Technologies an initial $9 million contract to develop uncrewed air vehicles optimized for adversary air missions, the Air Force Research Laboratory announced last week.

The effort, which AFRL has dubbed the Bandit program, calls for Blue Force Technologies to mature its UAV design — known as Fury — over the next 12 months, culminating in a critical design review and ground testing of the aircraft’s engine. If successful, the company could win additional contract options to build and flight test up to four drones.

The goal is “to develop an unmanned platform that looks like a fifth-generation adversary with similar vehicle capabilities,” Alyson Turri, who manages the Bandit program on behalf of the Air Force, said in a news release.

The Air Force maintains several “aggressor” squadrons of fighter aircraft that act as enemy “red air” forces during training exercises, such as the F-16Cs flown by the 64th Aggressor Squadron at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada. However, because the service does not have enough aggressor aircraft to simulate the numbers of enemies that US pilots could face during a war, it has also been forced to rely on contracted red air from companies such as Draken International and Textron’s Airborne Tactical Advantage Company.

Even that is not a full solution to the problem, as old third-generation fighters bought secondhand from foreign nations form the basis of most contracted aggressor fleets — making it almost impossible for the US Air Force to train against stealthy fifth-generation aircraft without having to delegate the “aggressor” role to its own pilots.

The Navy and Marine Corps are mired in the same challenges.

“There are flights going on as we speak, all around this country, where there are F-35s flying against other F-35s,” said Andrew Van Timmeren, vice president of government solutions for Blue Force Technologies and a former F-22 pilot, told Breaking Defense in a March 15th interview. “I would say that those [red air flights] have minimal value as far as preparation for the high-end fight.”

“If we can replace even just 10% or 15% of those red air sorties with [F-35s] being able to put back on blue air, Fury is going to be paying for itself in readiness overnight,” he said.

That doesn’t mean that all adversary air forces will transition to being uncrewed.

“We are augmenting the manned [adversary air] that’s already out there,” Van Timmeren said. “We are not going to be replacing it wholesale.”

Although Fury will have a similar aerodynamic performance as modern fighters, being capable of 9G turns, it will not be optimized for close-in aerial combat, Van Timmeren said. For that reason, dogfighting will continue to be the arena of piloted aircraft like those operated by the 64th Aggressor Squadron or Draken International.

Where Fury will excel is in simulating battle against low observable fighter jets occurring “beyond visual ranges,” Van Timmeren said. Fury is designed with a reduced radar cross section that mimics fifth-generation jets, making it a good fit to test human pilots’ abilities to find, identify and target stealth aircraft using their sensors.

The Road Ahead for Fury

While the Air Force’s investment into the Bandit program is a welcome sign of interest for Blue Force Technologies, Fury still has a long path ahead of it before it before it will be ready to use in daily training operations.

To be a viable option for the Air Force or other services, the company will have to keep prices affordable. Van Timmeren expects unit costs to be in single digit millions of dollars, similar to other attritable aircraft that are able to be lost in battle.

The Fury aircraft will measure 28-foot long with a 17-foot wingspan, and have a 5,000-pound max takeoff weight. Other than the design fuselage of the aircraft itself, “we are not inventing anything with this aircraft,” Van Timmeren said. The engine, flight computers and other components are all commercial, off-the-shelf systems.

Blue Force Technologies created a mock up of the Fury aircraft to test key software and hardware integration under a past contract with the Air Force, which took development to a preliminary design review. If all options are executed under the current contract, the company could be ready to fly its first Fury plane “within a couple of years,” with the eventual goal to showcase one operator controlling multiple aircraft.

An important point is that Blue Force Technologies is only responsible for developing the Fury air vehicle itself — not any of its sensors or mission systems, nor the autonomy core that will ensure the aircraft maintains safe separation from other aircraft and behaves like a piloted fighter.

That means that questions about how operators will control Fury drones, including the level of autonomy the drones will ultimately have, will be up to the Air Force to decide at a later date.

But Van Timmeren expects that over the course of the aircraft’s development and flight testing, the Air Force will learn not only how to use drones as aggressor aircraft, but the experience will also help the service figure out how it can use uncrewed aircraft in combat — a key priority of Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall, who has made the development of drone wingmen for the B-21 bomber and Next Generation Air Dominance fighter an “imperative” for the service.

“The Secretary of the Air Force … wants to get after more manned-unmanned teaming and combat collaborative aircraft,” Van Timmeren said. “I think that adversary air is a great sandbox by which we’re going to learn a lot of lessons to support that.”