(Des Barker)
The question often on many a fighter pilot’s minds is, “have we seen the last fighter ace?” Why is this even an issue? Well, becoming a fighter ace is one of the aspirations of a fighter pilot – why else would you bother?
Air forces worldwide are finding themselves with a shortage of combat experienced pilots with ‘kills’ against their names. Fighter pilots who have shot down an enemy aircraft are a rapidly shrinking community; the trend has been there for decades; there are no more aces on active duty and the number of fighter pilot’s with any ‘kills’, are decreasing. In a few more years, there will be no more living aces at all. There are four reasons for this.
Firstly, in the last half century, only three USAF pilots became aces. In nearly a century of operations, only 816 American air force fighter pilots became aces; approximately 87% of the aces originated during World War II, which ended nearly 75 years ago. There were 39 aces in the Korean war, and only three during the Vietnam war. In the last twenty years, seven fighter pilots scored two victories each, and three fighter pilots scored one each. None scored four or more victories. So, mathematically, it is clear that the fold has dwindled considerably.
Secondly, nuclear weapons have made wars between major powers that can afford to maintain large numbers of fighters, rare. The third reason, and often neglected, is the imbalanced air power picture that has prevailed over the past six decades, being the air dominance of Allied combat aviation. In the more recent past, the only significant wars have been mainly between second- and third-rate proxies, versus the might of Allied air power, a bit like “going to a gunfight with a knife”.
Since World War II, Allied air power has dominated every aerial battlefield they have entered – the result being fewer air battles. The enemy was either destroyed on the ground, or refused to fight. So, the lack of adequate opportunity to ‘make a kill’ prevents fighter pilots from building up a ‘score’. In today’s air battles, the biggest threat to Allied pilots is anti-aircraft defences, mainly surfaced launched and highly manoeuvrable and only then, fighters – so, where are the targets to come from to enable fighter pilots to achieve that magic number of 5 kills?
In a few more years, there will be no more living aces at all
Another factor mitigating against future fighter aces is the major shift in air power doctrine. With the threat posed to fighter pilots by technology, the engineering response has been to turn to unmanned aerial vehicles, including robotic fighters that no human pilot could overcome. This is because the unmanned aircraft can perform manoeuvres that the human body cannot sustain. The human weakness of g-intolerance has for long placed a restriction on maximising aircraft as a ‘killing tool’.
Robotic aircraft do not have this problem. Moreover, a robotic aircraft would be computer controlled through software and would possess a significantly higher degree of situational awareness; much more than any human pilot could ever possess. This isn’t science fiction, the human simply cannot make inflight decisions, and execute them, faster than a computer – it’s not a revolution in technology that is creating the robotic fighter, but an evolution.
The bad news is the ace is facing extinction!
WHO WAS ACTUALLY THE BEST EVER?
Is it even possible to answer this question? Aces are the inspirational role models of fighter pilots and most fighter pilots that have made a study of their trade have debated, but never settled the question: Who was the best fighter pilot ever?
Manfred von Richthoven, WWI’s Red Baron, must be one such contender, while another is, Erich Hartmann, who is the all-time kills leader with 352 in World War II. Could it have been David McCampbell, who shot down nine aircraft in a single sortie on 24 October 1944?
Could the award for the ‘best’ be to the highest number of aerial victories in a single day? This was claimed by Emil Lang, who claimed 18 Soviet fighters on 3 November 1943, or Erich Rudorffer who is credited with the destruction of 13 aircraft in a single sortie on 11 October 1943.
A case could be made for each of them, but the fact is, one cannot really determine who the best of all time was. Nevertheless, the ego of the fighter pilot, despite the statistics, will ponder what their chances of becoming a fighter ace are or going down in history as one of the best fighter pilots?
THE CHANGING BATTLESPACE
Interestingly, throughout the ages, more than 5,400 pilots have become aces, and they have only one thing in common: shooting down five or more enemy aircraft in air-to-air combat; Baron Von Richthoven said, “Not much else really matters.” In the one-hundred and eight years of air combat (World War I to the present), the aircraft have advanced from the Sopwith Camel to the F-35. The skills needed to become an ace have changed, and so has the nature of air combat.
In the days of Von Richthoven and Hartmann, most of the kills were with guns. This held through the Korean War, but increasing aircraft speeds through each war and the eventual introduction of air-to-air missiles, all contributed to changing air combat tactics and the skills required. Speeds ranging from 100 kts for the Sopwith Camel to 350 kts for the Bf-109 to 590 kts for the F-86F that dominated the skies over Korea.
In Vietnam, first generation air-to-air missiles entered the fray, not always successfully, but the missiles allowed kills to be accomplished from as far as 2,5 nm away with the AIM-9B Sidewinder – still within visual range but significantly further out than the typical guns range of 0.5 nm maximum. Today, the AIM-120 AMRAAM and other missiles can kill you without you even seeing the opposing aircraft (from as far as 86 nm away in the case of the AIM-120D).
Beyond visual range (BVR) combat has forever changed the way in which air combat is conducted; the days of pilots being selected as fighter pilots for their handling and energy management skills and situational awareness have been replaced by technology in which the pilot with the longest range missile and the ability for first detection, will in all likelihood be victorious. With closing speeds of supersonic proportions during a head-on attack, classical ‘dogfighting’ will be left to the survivors from the first missile engagement, only if opposing forces engage. There is no doubt that being a modern fighter pilot in a highly technological battlespace, is a hazardous undertaking.
Even during WWII, the circumstances faced by these aces were different. Hartmann was in constant combat from 1942 onwards – most of it against Russian pilots. Allied pilots, on the other hand, were continuously rotated between tours in an effort to provide them with some respite from operations and allow them to plough back their experience in the training of aspirant fighter pilots.
USAF studies in the wake of the Vietnam War (Red Baron study) indicated that 80% of the pilots killed never knew that they were a target until their killer opened fire. This was true then and will remain true in all future air combat. Hartmann estimated that a similar percentage of his victims never knew he was there until he opened fire.
The results of the Red Baron study, which were in keeping with the observations of other American aces, led to the concept of maintaining situational awareness (knowing exactly where you are, and where everyone else is in the dogfight). Probably one of the most valuable tools for Allied Force pilots is JTIDS (Joint Tactical Information Data System), a datalink that provides each pilot with a virtual 3-D ‘mental picture’ of the combat geometry. A similar capability is available on all 4th and 5th generation fighters, including the Gripen.
The well-known example of the JTIDS testing on the F-15, reported drastic increases in their situational awareness; in an exercise, they took on F-15s and E-3s without JTIDS, and achieved a 4-to-1 kill ratio in their favour, mostly because the pilots with JTIDS knew where the ‘blue force aircraft, and the ‘red force’ bandits were, and could sort out who was going to target which bandit a lot quicker than the ones without.
Aerial combat has become less of a single hunter, but rather a team of hunters with the fighter pilot’s only responsible for pushing the missile launch pushbutton. The integrated support of several role players involved in the ‘kill’ should all receive acknowledgement for their role, or not?
THE FUTURE OF AIR COMBAT
One thing is for certain though. The future for fighter pilots will be determined through innovative engineering and the role and function of artificial intelligence. As recently as August 2020, an event in the USA turned fighter pilots’ concerns into reality.
The never-ending saga of machines outperforming humans has opened a new chapter as the USAs Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) engineers claimed that an artificial algorithm had beaten a human fighter pilot in a virtual dogfight. The contest was the finale of the U.S. military’s Alpha Dogfight Challenge, an exercise to “demonstrate the feasibility of developing effective, intelligent autonomous agents capable of defeating adversary aircraft in a dogfight” using nose-aimed guns only.
The Artificial Intelligence (AI) faced off against a human fighter pilot, callsign ‘Banger’, sitting in a simulator and wearing a virtual reality helmet, and the AI won five rounds to zero. What the reports did not state, however, was that their robot had been through at least 4 billion simulations and had acquired at least 12 years of experience.
Being a modern fighter pilot in a highly technological battlespace is a hazardous undertaking.
Be that as it may, canned and rigid exercises are not very useful without catering for the thinking, unpredictable, higher order tactically thinking, fighter pilot and doesn’t prove anything unless through machine learning and teaching an algorithm, it can counter the myriad of various options available to the tactically astute human pilot. Robot fighter pilots are a long way off and most fighter pilots, would relish engaging a robot fighter. Fortunately, we are not there yet and not likely to get there within the foreseeable future.
The director of the Strategic Technology Office at DARPA described the trial as a victory for better human and machine teaming in combat, which was the real point. The contest was part of a broader DARPA effort called Air Combat Evolution (ACE) which didn’t necessarily seek to replace pilots with unmanned systems, but rather sought to automate a lot of fighter pilot tasks.
By the fifth and final round of the dogfight, ‘Banger’ was able to significantly shift his tactics and survive much longer. The standard tactics that he used weren’t working. It didn’t matter though as in the end he hadn’t learned fast enough and was defeated.
Robot fighter pilots are a long way off
So, what we are witnessing is the beginning of a type of human-machine interdependence, a human sitting in the cockpit, being flown by one of these AI algorithms as truly being one weapon system, a system of systems, where the human is focusing on what the human does best such as higher order strategic thinking and the AI is doing what the AI does best.
CONCLUSION
The variables of technological progress through the various eras and the consequent requirements on piloting skills at the specific time in history make it impossible to definitively determine the best fighter pilot in history. One might be able to determine the best of an era or a war, but even then, it will be the subject of debate for years.
Considering the technological progress in aerial combat and the ever-changing strategies and tactics of modern warfare, it will most certainly take some special occurrence before a single fighter pilot is able to notch up 5 kills for ace status.
References:
Dunnigan James. The Age of the Fighter Ace Ends. 22 September 2004.
Hutchison, Harold C. Why You Can’t Tell Who Was the Best Fighter Pilot Ever. 30 June 2005.
