Special Lecture: F-22 Flight Controls

flight

control, this image is the raptors cockpit inside, some pretty dramatic differences between the two, so again, tell them, what do you see? glass cabin, where does that help you? Oh yeah, it's cool that you see these new mercedes benz and bmws digital cockpits or whatever, like in the old days, you just knew the speed and the tack, if you want, now you can set it however you want. Become the moment you start putting that in there, I don't get it, yeah, the moment you start doing things like that, you start creating a software plane that gives you a lot of flexibility and danger.

We'll talk about that a little later. What else do you see? Flight

controls

. Why, since today we are mainly talking about

flight

controls

. Side lever. Yes, right there is the control stick on an F-15 that sits directly between your knees on a Raptor. That's your control stick. It's on the side. Why would you want to put something like that aside? Go ahead, okay, you can't move your head, that's part of it that helps and you actually can't see it here, it's partly there, but it's kind of a little section here. It's a drop-down armrest, so your wrist is on the stick, your elbow is, so to speak, resting on an armrest, so it gives you a lot of comfort leverage from there, um, that's one of the reasons, and there are a couple more reasons why you would want to go to the center, with the side stick, stick your legs in the final direction, your legs get in the way, that's a big problem, um, because on this plane you really became pretty.

Well, after a while, it flies where if you really need to maneuver the club, you lift your leg and move that way to get everything out of the way. On the other side too, it may not be so obvious. but you see how that stick that's about at eye level, you see how that stick gets in the way of some of the instruments, so it's just there, right on a side stick that's all the way to the side and all these real estate is completely open. The other thing I'll give you again just for the sake of time is that it's a bit of a shift in thinking when you have a center shift, it's like when you're driving a car and when you're in the parking lot, you know you're trying to park your car, you want be able to maneuver that wheel a lot, eh, but when you're at highway speeds, if you were to take the wheel and maneuver it that much again, you're going to roll the car, so on a center stick you move the stick to be able to deflect the control surfaces of flight, there is a physical shift of the stick for that to happen on a side stick that initially when they first put it in didn't. move at all, so imagine if you were in your car and you wanted to turn and instead of the wheel moving you just put pressure on the wheel itself and that was enough to transmit to the computer in the car to turn the wheels, that It was a Problem initially that we can talk about after the presentation.

It's kind of a sidebar discussion. This is a question of human factors. It is a side lever. Initially it didn't move. In the end they decided that I will put a little deviation so I can go halfway. inch to the left half an inch to the right about a quarter of an inch forward because normally, you know, I go about a half inch back because normally I really want the nose to go this way, if it had that much forward deviation, I don't want to fly the plane this way, so you have the ability to do that, but it gives you a little bit of the best of both worlds, there is some deflection to give you information that you have entered something into the stick, but not so much deflection that it get in the way of everything else you're trying to do, there's limited space in the cockpit of a fighter.

The last piece I'll give you and it's a little hard to see here are all those buttons on the stick. you know what you have the ability to do, so it's exactly like steering wheels in modern cars right now, you can control the volume of the radio, everything else like that, you can do it from the steering wheel, same thing in a fighter, you know. called practical acceleration and hotas with lever. and allows you to control everything you want to do in the airplane without ever having to leave your hands off the throttle on the stick.

The other piece I'll give you is that in a raptor, in a fighter like this. it's your stick this is your throttle on a raptor because flight control modes can change a lot this is your right inceptor and this is your left inceptor everything is considered part of the flight control system okay, let's move on, like in your auto where if you want to go to xm radio you go to the media source or whatever and go to xm satellite radio. You have buttons because it's a software driven airplane just like we saw before and I can bring up a flight control screen that shows me the position of all my flight control surfaces again, the pilot is very far forward in the front of this airplane while I reroute things, sometimes I can't see them, so initially this was a flight test screen so I wouldn't have to do the above. poltergeist thing and I try to turn all the way around so I can see the back of the plane and see if the elevator is moving, I basically instrument everything and I can see it here now, some of the human factor stuff that's cool. with how they did this, so this here, again, this tells you at the top the rudder deflection surfaces, the ailerons, where the horizontal stabilizers are, how the engines are running, this is a little strange, I don't really care. like how they did this, but this. are the leading edge flaps le flaps or the main inch flaps, so it just shows you how far they are deflected dug into the lower left corner, it shows you the center of gravity, so there are limits, like you know what I would do.

I usually do the flight planning for your cessna. Hey, I can only put in this amount of fuel with this amount of passengers and I have to be within this limit for takeoff and landing and everything else the plane tells you. Now, what's so good about some of the things they do? What we've done in Raptor is that if it goes out of bounds again it doesn't wait for you to take out the piece of paper with the magic wheel and the e6b, it just changes color and turns red and gives you a warning and says Hey idiot, you're beyond the aft center of gravity, no indicator tells you that you're just having a hard time seeing where all the fuel is and everything else, that's a different story, but it tells you where the average aerodynamic bead percentage is at which you are sitting. and it's capable of adjusting things, so I'll give it to you because what this allows is, by the way, the last part here is the flight control, in other words, this tells you where you've moved the stick and tells you to trim. so you know where the setting is set and it also tells you where the lever is set so you know the inputs that go through there when you have a software controlled machine you can customize things and make it very simple you guys have seen that terrible.

Terrible, horrible movie, Top Gun, right, is just horrible, so that scene where Maverick loses his engines and they go through this engine, one engine is off, engine two is off and they do a flat turn towards the sea, which which is a lot of nonsense when you are. in a turn you don't travel on the ground, you fall straight down, so this whole thing about flying into the sea is ridiculous, it doesn't happen that way, if you don't have a software driven plane, when you lose engines that way then you have to pass Because of all this, it's like, for example, in the Cessna, if you lose an engine, you lose the engine, what do you have to do right? set your glide, set everything up, check to see on my left, right or both on the fuel source what is my blah blah blah and everything else on the raptor is as amazing as it gets you literally do nothing you sit there and the computer says oh you lost the engine, I realized you have a problem, let me see if I can help you and it will restart the engine for you, if it can do it ok, if it can't restart it, the engine probably won't restart and it may Leave it off if you allow it. human factor designs because in this plane on the raptor, believe it or not, when you're flying the raptor you're not thinking about flying the raptor, you're thinking about employing the raptor, so you're trying to find where all your wingmen are . are where the bad guys are, etc., flying is secondary, while in this plane flying is everything, so they tried to relieve the pilot as much as possible of the greater burden of responsibility of thinking about flying the plane by doing little tricks like that .

The other thing I'll give you as well about the flight controls is that again we talked about how the ailerons can go up, the ailerons can go down, the flappers go up, down, the rudders go up and down in takeoff mode. Great, so here's the nose look here in takeoff mode without any pilot input, so there's no flap switch in the cockpit, there's no leading edge, there's nothing, there's none of that, it just knows based on the fact that you have the shifter. down and you're on the ground and you feel the weight on the wheels you think this guy wants to take off so both rudders are going to deflect in, why would you do that?

Gosh, so it needs a shorter runway, so, not quite, there's a tie between the flight controls though, in other words, if I take the rudders and tow both of them so that both rudders drift, does it? What effect does that have from an aerodynamic point of view? Which direction will the nose go if these rudders deviate? top right to make it easier to turn the plane on takeoff because the rudders deflect on both, come in to the right, uh, the other part is also that we talked about this, have you ever seen an aerobatic competition like one of those. 300 additional types of airplanes see the aileron run the entire length of the wing, so as for the pilot, all they have to do is simply touch the wing and the airplane will corkscrew and spiral in a raptor, that's part of the reason why The aileron and flapper can move together as a surface, so the leading edge flaps will dig into the trailing aileron and the cold edge flap will also dig in on takeoff without pilot intervention, while the wing would normally be seen.

Something like that with a little bit of camber on takeoff, the wing looks like this, it's cool when you look at it from the side, so if you look at it directly from the side, the leading edge flap goes down. They go down, which puts a lot of camber in the wing and creates a lot of lift, over and over again, that's completely independent of the pilot, the pilot hasn't done anything other than just tell him I'm on the ground because the gear lever is on. Lastly, what would be the typical rotation speed? Yeah, so that's a good question, what do you guys think?

So I start on the runway, by the way, I need 8,000 feet of runway, this whole 2,500 feet is not for a raptor unfortunately, 8,000 feet of runway, but when I actually get ready to pull that lever to turn, how far fast do you think it's going? I want 200. Well, about 150 is typical, usually, by the way, about takeoff weights. The plane weighs about 34 or 35 tons at takeoff compared to, you know, 2,500 pounds or whatever, so it's a very heavy plane, it has to get up to a lot of speed to be able to achieve that rotation, but it's about 150 to 160 knots on takeoff, that is.

Faster than ever to exceed the speed of the Cessna as it goes, but yeah, so the flight controls are there to help you, the other thing I'm going to show you as well is that there's a sailplane, guys, where am I? gliding planes, so on the left on a copper sail plane you usually have a lever for the speed brakes, spoilers on the right, so these large surfaces that appear on the wing to slow the plane down adjust the tracks gliding and those kinds of things we talked about a little bit. Previously on how the electrical engineers want this to be completely stealthy and whatever, the last thing they want to do based on the discussion we just had is I don't want to have a big dashboard in the middle of this plane. because that will make my radar reflection very large, so they did something extraordinary: they use the flight control surfaces as speed brakes, so if I need to slow the plane down, I press a small switch on the throttle and immediately What happens is the leading edge flaps will go down a little bit, the ailerons will go up, the rudders will go out, so they will both bank and that will be used to help slow the airplane.

It's actually quite effective, which is great. right a couple more things we'll go through landing mode the pilot hasn't done anything the landing throttles are back the gear stick is down and all of this is happening here let me zoom this in here so that It's the spoiler, it's up, shit, the other one is up too. the lit fin goes up on both sides of the rudders, you can see how they are both towing a bit there, the reason it does so is that it is trying totransfer all that weight from the wings and put it into the gear. so it's trying to remove all the lift from the wings and transfer it to the landing gear so that you have maximum traction on the wheels when you hit the brakes and slow down also when refueling, so that when you go to refuel in the air there's a little uh switch that you open on the jet that opens this door that tells the jet that I'm getting ready to refuel while I'm in the air when it does it says this guy is no longer trying to fight the plane, they're trying to get gas, so I don't need all the roll capability and everything else and really what I really want is an airplane that really responds with its lift and, again, there's no pilot input, but the edge flaps. attack will be deployed downwards.

The trailing edge flaps and ailerons will also deploy down again. They're trying to create a curvature in that wing. This is all digital flight control. There is no input from the pilot. What would be a typical air speed when doing this mid-air refueling? This is. About Oops, sorry, let me back up, this is about 300 300 knots or so something like that. You have to be able to fly, so for a bird of prey it's a bit slow. For a tanker, that's pretty fast. You're trying to find that marriage where both airplanes have good flying qualities so that one isn't close to stalling and the other is at full power trying to overtake them by the most unnatural act I've ever done as a fighter.

The pilot is connecting my plane to another plane. I never got used to it. I can do it very well, but the whole notion of this big boom connecting my plane to the big airliner was really strange and strange to me, I never got used to it. Okay some of the limiters, so on an F-15 because we talked about that a little bit earlier, the F-15 can go up to 500 600 miles per hour and you can operate it with both hands. the stick, you can pull that stick all the way. back and you will tear the wings off the plane and turn it into a big metal ball that will cascade to the ground because you have overestimated the plane again, that horrible, terrible top gun movie where Tom Cruise gets out of the plane and spins again , has exceeded a certain capacity of the airplane and the airplane goes out into controlled flight and enters some kind of uncontrolled situation in a raptor that used to be in the pilot's operating manual a little blurb That said, you can maneuver this airplane with reckless abandon and You will not overtake the plane.

You will not leave the plane from controlled flight. They did a spectacular job. They allowed this airplane to get right on the edge of performance, but not over the top. the top, one of the cool things they did with the airplanes on a left turn, look at that spoiler, it's up, look at that spoiler, it depends on what the fuck is going on there and if you know this one, you really understand the model because No. I knew this for a long time, so again, just for the moment, I know we have guys that come after the center of gravity, the plane is right here, in your engineering classes, you always talk about forces acting on the center of gravity and It's like taking this whole airplane and modeling it down to a point mass and saying that's what you know for the sake of all the analysis of the sum of forces that you know well in real life.

This is about 43 feet wide, yes you can. add the forces there, but there are forces acting all over this plane at different points, think here about the wing tip, I put g on the plane and this wing tip is almost like the wings want to fold up right when I'm going down, so you put a lot of stress on the wingtips, so their response, quite ingeniously, was to deflect the ailerons down when you're in high maneuvers. The way you know you're high maneuvering is that you can see these little threads forming on the tips of the wings. then you are creating low pressure, that's another one too.

You can see the clouds forming on the front edge of the wing. The low pressure causes the air to condense and then you create clouds so you know the plane is actually maneuvering upwards and a stress reducing response. on the wingtips was to deflect the ailerons up, which happens with the lift of the wingtips with the ailerons up goes down properly, so it helps to push those wings down again so you don't try to stress too much the plane. There are limiters like this all over the plane so you won't overshoot the plane, you can't literally do whatever you want with this plane, that's what I'm telling you, it's easier to fly a raptor than it is.

It's flying a Cessna because you really have to pay attention to what you're doing in a Cessna on a Raptor. I could put my son there and he can do this all day at any speed and he won't do anything bad to the plane. It's really pretty spectacular how they did it uh the other part I'll give you here is some of the command systems so if I'm in a dogfight and I'm trying to shoot the other guy I go against a maneuvering target and then The flight controls are transferred to what is called a g-command system.

If I'm maneuvering at four g and I release the stick, the plane will stay at four g and if I see the target maneuvering, I need to go to six g. or seven g, I'll put it in and the plane will keep it, in other words, it's a correct vote. I'm not physically connected to anything, I talk to the computer and say I want six g and the plane does all kinds. of black magic and sorcery behind me and lo and behold, the plane reaches between six and seven g, which really matters when you are in a high maneuverability situation, so it issues the g command when you are slower, that is, at land and I want to put that flight path marker right on that edge of the runway because that's where I want to land right at the thousand foot markers, so in that scenario I don't really care that much about the g command, I care about the pitch speed and that's why he makes the transition.

I go to a pitch speed command and if I don't put any command on the stick, it says zero pitch speed again. The black magic and the sorcerer will happen behind me, the flight controls will do whatever it takes to make sure my pitch rate stays at zero so that I transition from one type of flight control system to another without any intervention from the pilot, it's just based on a flight command system, okay, so let's talk about a couple of the implications of that and then we'll move on to the questions at the end, can you? do the flight control raptor video at the top it's about a minute and then take it to full screen and press pause thank you okay this is full screen and pause okay can you go back to the beginning real quick?

The video in the cockpit looking up at the screens is a big no-no because you could see things, so we won't even bother with that, but what they did do was the raptor flight demo team, which is outside the base from Langley, Virginia, who assembled. a camera in the cockpit looking aft what I love about this is that you can see very quickly what is happening with the airplane, so again the leading edge slats don't get any input from the pilot other than just maneuvering and They will deploy anywhere. They need it, you'll see the horizontal stabilizers and if you're close, you'll be able to see where the ailerons are doing and what the flappers are doing.

Nice trick and we'll see this as we go through this high g demo. guys, you know, this gets a little advanced, but there is a thing called static margin, which is a stability issue of this airplane again, this airplane in its bare fuselage configuration has no hydraulics, no computers, nothing on board the airplane It is totally unstable. What's keeping it stable is the computer itself, what you'll see is this maneuver where it'll do a g-turn and you'll see all the clouds forming at the back of the plane, pay attention to what the leading edge flaps are doing.

Digging into the horizontal stabilizers, you'll see that they initially move to initiate the turn, but then once established in the turn, the way it controls things is that it moves around the aerodynamic center and the center of gravity, it does wandering around a bit. with the lift on the wing and it is doing it by deflecting the flaps from the leading edge so that the flight control surface display that I showed you before, the horizontal stabilizers are completely aerodynamic and all the maneuvers come from the wing itself, which It's pretty amazing then. video no, no, go to the flight controls, we'll see, I'll come back, okay, yeah, and then we'll just see how this time passes without the funky club music, I guess hopefully, horizontal stability, I totally know. speed again, it is a g command system, the pilot is commanding a certain speed of g and minor deviations are occurring up to here, along the trailing edge of the plane, the pilots have no information about that, the system is doing everything possible to order that g that the pilot has. order, you'll see another maneuver here, pause for a second, so this maneuver is and again, slow speed, airplanes going up and what they're trying to do is basically lean forward all the way and make the airplane almost like you're flying and like you're going up and then you want to lean forward and then accelerate horizontally like that, the way it's achieved is through that thrust vectoring that happens, but as that maneuver happens again , all the pilot is doing is just pushing straight forward on the stick and watch what happens with all the flight controls on the back of the plane to keep the plane going exactly where the pilot wants it to play, so that you'll see big deviations in that.

Horizontal stabilizer is pretty good, you can keep playing, so what you are seeing is from the outside of the plane. We'll see more of it in the demo. The plane is basically doing pirouettes in the sky so it falls straight down but it is very Controllable, it flies at speeds of about 60 to 65 miles per hour but very very controllable and you will see every part of the flight control surface in the back of this plane drifting to do what it needs to do, so don't think of it in terms of aileron lift it's a little fluid when it's a raptor, it's stuff that happens back there, tap and follow the video, okay, this shows a little bit of yeah, you can go and play it and press pause for a second, just do this setup, okay, very quick setup for this video, this is the downside of a digital flight control system, because in this plane again it's pure cables, pulleys, ratios, gears and things like that, in this plane it's software code.

It's zeros and ones and you better get it right and it's all interconnected, we talked about how moving the gear stick tells the flight control system something different if I open the mid-air refueling door, it tells the control something different in flight, in this case the power setting of the plane tells the plane something different this guy one of my good friends test pilot exceptional guy so don't think of this as him being a bad pilot he's not he's amazing but the plane believed something that wasn't really true because there was a mistake in how the software was coded and you will see the first approach, he will make an approach, he will take off again with what is called military power, so they will not use afterburner and the plane He will behave well next time.

It's using afterburner energy, so you'll see fire coming out of the back of the plane and that changes something in the flight system of the engines, which tells the flight control computer a different condition and what ended up happening. is that the gains if the lever was completely off, so again this would be like if you were at highway speed and that same wheel deflection that you would use to park your car in your garage now that a little wheel deflection does the same turning of the tires. forward so you go into what's called a pilot-induced oscillation tweet which basically says you're out of phase with the plane if I'm driving my car and I turn the steering wheel to the right the car goes left while it's going the left. trying to correct that, I'm going right now, things are going well and then you drift with the airplane and you'll see what happens, go ahead and play the way you see all the flight control surfaces drifting in the back, this is now. in a pitch rate system, so you're just trying to land the plane, the rear of the plane does whatever it takes to keep that flight path marker exactly where it needs to go and again all the flight control surfaces They diverted military power because the engines are black, if you do it on this one, next time you'll see it maneuver with the afterburner and you'll see it go into this pitch-induced oscillation that is the airplane.chase, by the way, it's an F-16 following them, so Same prepares to land, the camera goes out of focus here for a second and comes back into focus, just notice everything that's happening in the back of this plane to maintain the pitch speed that the pilot ordered.

Two things will happen here. select the afterburner and lift the gear which changes the flight control laws and the gains were not set correctly. There's the afterburner and now you see that it's out of phase with the airplane and it's doing everything it can to keep the airplane from hitting the ground and it can. It won't prevent it, okay, but the plane was pretty well scraped, you can imagine, so it's just a hazard. Digital flight controls allow for a lot of flexibility and creativity. There used to be a term, it's just software. You know, we can figure it out.

Not true when it comes to vehicles like this, where small changes to the software code can have dramatic implications on the aircraft's capability, so an incredible amount of demo is needed, yes you can enter the raptor demo and with that we can Go ask questions because I'm kinda done uh no okay so we can play this at full speed or full screen if you want you want to answer questions while it's running yeah so this is from another good friend of mine named Zeke Skelicki, who was the pilot of the Raptor demo, exceptional guy, but this is the Raptor demo, if you've ever seen it, so we'll answer some questions while this goes on, yes, more than one to one, so the plane is approximately sixty-three sixty-four. thousand pounds, normally a tent on takeoff, the thrust coming out the back is 70 thousand pounds, so on a nice cold day, like if you're close enough to sea level, you'll actually go faster than the speed of sound as you climb. which is great, oh yeah, try to repeat the question if you can, oh sorry, because it doesn't have a microphone, so the question was, well the question was the thrust weight ratio, is it greater than one to one, a little larger than one to one at takeoff.

The way you look at this maneuver here real quick, so that's the thrust vectoring, it kind of kicks in to really catch the airplane, so initially it's the flight control surfaces and then as things slow down, thrust vectoring kicks in to basically turn the plane into a flat plate. The second question was about thrust vectoring on takeoff, so it will increase a little bit, not a lot, just a little bit up just to help the nose turn, but just a little bit. This is that high angle of attack, uh, type of maneuver if it will continue forward, all good questions.

Yes, you said that all the software is basically written so that the plane cannot be damaged. Yes, the pilot becomes one of them? Can it put you in a situation where it can hurt you? Yes, a lot, in fact, we've reached that point now where the pilot greatly limits the performance of the airplane because the airplane can do so much more than you can, so that this is what is called a fifth generation, first generation fighter. It was like an F-86 type airplane from the old Korean War and then, successively, through the generations, you get to this fifth generation, which to me is the pinnacle of what you can achieve with a human and an airplane together. .

The sixth generation will involve working as a team. this drone aircraft and the drones are going to be much more capable from a maneuvering standpoint because they don't have the limitation of the pilot and all the life support systems that come with it and everything else, so everything that weight you would normally go into that, you can get away with putting other things in there when I told you flying is about the same speed as Cessna, I mean this is those kind of maneuvers where you can get away with it again, look flight control. surfaces in the back and what will happen later on, they will do a pass where it will open the doors and you can see the main weapons compartment that is under the belly of the plane and then you will see the side doors of the weapons compartment, so you can see where all the weapons are carried inside the plane again, a big center of gravity challenge, by the way, so here's that maneuver so you can see the doors open.

One thing I didn't really tell you is that in that situation because you know the missiles weigh a few hundred pounds a piece, roughly, some of the bombs weigh about a thousand pounds a piece, when you lose all that weight right away, it's literally like dropping a car from the front of your plane because of the way it is attached. that center of gravity problem is changing the fuel inside the plane to slosh the fuel forward or backward to keep the center of gravity again completely pilot there is no fuel control panel where I go we'll move this and click on this and whatever it does everything goes on completely automatically, yeah, the sensors you can use so all the fuel tanks are instrumented, so you know the status of the fuel in terms of where things are set, it tells you what it is you really have the ability to know what it is. on the plane, so when you load a missile it says oh, it's this type of missile and it weighs this much and it knows its mass properties and sets it up from there, so it actually identifies it on its own. like in a cirrus, you have to go, you have to pick up a screen in the cirrus and go, my passenger weighs this and I have this luggage on board and then it gives you a picture of where the center of gravity is. this because it's all digital the missile has a little connecting rod that plugs in and says ah look I'm a missile oh the weight of the pilot doesn't matter uh because they expect it well it matters but for a different reason it matters for the ejection seat predominantly because the ejection seat um you know, I think it's like 135 pounds is the light is something like 11535 to 220 or something like that is something around that point um to be able to be within the safe envelope of the ejection seat, that's where the weight of the ejection seat matters. pilot, um, but they specify the center of gravity so that as long as anyone can sit in front, you're not going to deflect the CG of the plane even if you're far away. in front of the CG and there's a moment arm, but between everything else in the cockpit, I mean the ejection seat is ridiculously heavy and all the avionics that are in front, the radars in front, I mean all these things that are there, they have a much greater contribution to the center of gravity than you, unless you are like Shaq or something, but God in the flight deck or on the helmet display, so not on this plane yet, that coming soon, some of the oldest ones.

Airplanes, believe it or not, have that, like the F-15 I flew, you had a

special

helmet that had all the information displayed on the visor, so on top of that, hit the throttle and stick so you don't have to take e Don't touch anything to touch anything in the cabin. I also don't have to look in the cockpit to see the altitude. The speed of the air. The course. Everything is shown to me in front of me. This plane will eventually understand that it didn't make the. programmatic discussion right now, they only had a limited amount of dollars to spend and they said this plane is so awesome that it shouldn't need a helmet-mounted display system because it should be able to see all the bad guys from a far enough distance and not be a problem, we presented the airplane that way and all the pilots, so the first group of pilots all transitioned from airplanes that had that helmet-mounted system and they came to this airplane where it didn't have it and they were angry.

We have to get that back, so that's where a lot of the efforts now are going to modernize the airplane a little bit. What more good questions follow? Yes, we still need humans in the cockpit, why not just go for unmanned systems? Yes, it's the big debate in the hunting community right now and you're really touching on something very deep. The best answer so far is the best, I mean, we talked a lot about the hardware and the systems on board the aircraft. Really, the greatest capability in an airplane is the mind of the person flying in front, if it's a very dynamic and changing environment, being able to tell a machine that can take in all those inputs and make the right decisions based on that type.

It's hard to do right now, I'm not saying we're not going to get there right now, it's hard for us to use unmanned systems much now, it's like in surveillance missions where you can just launch the thing and it has a programmed pre-navigation and It knows what it needs to do and can set things up. Those are somewhat limited problems. Probably the best way to describe it is that you could use an unmanned system for that job. It's difficult in a combat situation. It is extremely dynamic. it's a battle royale wwf mosh pit any possible chaotic situation you can put in, that's what it looks like and therefore having a human mind connected to that environment to be able to adapt and do what the mind does better than what a mind does machine at least at this moment. that's the main argument for keeping humans in the system for now, there is a follow up on that, yes, to operate them remotely, yes, it's the timeline, it is, um, yes, the question is do you operate these things remotely, even if you had So, you know, in the classic example we'll use Sully Sullenberger, just like we talked about Sully in the previous one.

You take off from Laguardia, you lose both engines. If you could have a remote pilot sitting somewhere else who could take control and decide to land on it. Hudson because a machine most likely wouldn't have made that decision. Is there a lag problem? The answer is 100. Yes. There is a delay problem between the display of that information. Make the input go back up and back to one thing. What we did in test pilot school is remember that we showed that flight path marker before, where as a pilot you put the flight path marker and that's exactly where your plane is going to go if there's a delay that's really going to mess you up because there's a delay of one or two seconds between what you're seeing and what the plane is actually doing at test pilot school, they actually built a flight test or flight path marker that takes that time delay into account , if you know the time delay will actually take it into account.

This allows you to fly the plane remotely even with the time delay and still be able to do very high gain tasks, like landing the plane for example, where things are changing very quickly, so it's a new science that doesn't It has been fully developed here, but it is a proof of concept. It has been shown that you can control an aircraft remotely even with time delay. Who really cares about that right now is the airlines because, to be very honest, pilots tend to be a pain in the neck for an airline and if you can eliminate the pilots and just have a remotely operated system or even a autonomous system uh from a business point of view the company really likes that from an aviation point of view it triggers all kinds of discussions and many other topics but that's a question well let me jump let me .

Skip for a minute on that, I think actually for me one of the holy grails of GA security would be to have a human co-pilot, maybe you know that on the ground, so if you had that kind of telemetry that you have in a in a drone, you know, a human somewhere else might say you know you're running out of fuel or you forgot to change the tanks, all the things that the human co-pilot could do right in the cockpit, you know most of that list safety check It could probably be improved remotely, so it would be a great addition to a Cessna or even a Piper, and it's seen a little bit now on some of the more advanced airplanes, as we talked a little bit, if I have a problem engine in the Raptor.

I literally do nothing, I just sit there and look at the clouds and say, what a beautiful day! and the computer fixes it for me. There are other scenarios where the plane tells me, "hey, you have a problem with the generator" and then stops immediately. generator failure checklist allows me to fix it so you guys see some basic automation right now a couple more questions are already in play. I know we're falling short guys, how much is a flying bird of prey? strange for not being in the cockpit for not being there so automated at this point it's the same if you're sitting there yeah if it's a uh then we have two terms one is called beyond visual range which means that I can't see the other one. guy with my eyes but my sensors can see it um and if I'm firing missiles at long range so I don't lose control because I'm remote it's like a video game literally it's exactly like a video game um yeah it's a maneuvering environment where I see the guy and we're in a dogfight, so yeah, you lose a lot in terms of eyeball seat, just things that are hard to automate, so it's half and half right in a drone scenario.

I mean would it be a fightof dogs with drones? I don't know, it's a good question. I'm not so sure God can address that. Could you have a simulator? You could, um, but then I have to have some way to represent the physical environment that the drone is in. Since I have to be able to represent that for the guy in the simulator on the ground. I have to be able to transmit that in real time. um, it matters, so, uh, who plays sports, guys, you know, I mean, when they play. In sports where you have an opponent, you get that if you play a lot, like if it's racquetball or soccer or something, you get really good at watching your opponent and being able to see micro-movements before the actual big movement happens, so that you know, oh. they're about to turn this way or they're going to launch this way so you can read your opponent and make a decision about what's going to happen within a second or two in a fighter jet, exactly the same if I'm fighting a guy and I see a deflection on the control surface before the plane is even gone.

I know the person is going here. I can position myself to be there before it arrives. I'd need some way to represent that if I'm in a ground simulator. and it would have to be something transparent to the guy in the simulator what feels like a lot of good questions it's good class let me ask where is who is here from the flying club uh sebastian yes yes actually I wonder if you can keep them another one uh 10 15 minutes absolutely, why don't we have Sebastian jump in and give us a flying club spiel and then they'll both be up front for questions right after.

Thanks Liz, don't worry.