AUS&R 2013 Air Show Update: Maj. Gen. Eitan Ben Eliahu’s Address

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“Being expelled from the cockpit may hurt our ego, as pilots. We’ve all been raised on dogfights. However, I can envision air battles between unmanned platforms in the far future, not dogfights as we know them now but a sort of an air to air mission.” That’s probably a part of our future, not just fantasy – these projections were made by Maj. Gen. (Res.) Eitan Ben Eliahu in his keynote address. Ben Eliahu is a former Air Force Commander and combat pilot, who also commanded various Air Force flights and bases.

In his keynote address at the autonomous, unmanned vehicles air show, Ben Eliahu went back to the beginning: During the Yom Kippur War Israel didn’t have any aerial images of the tens of thousand of Egyptian soldiers getting ready to cross the Suez Canal. We needed these images badly but had no access to any. 40 years have passed, and the growth in the unmanned vehicles market was immense. Over the last ten years unmanned vehicle manufacturing in the U.S. grew by 150-200 percent. Platforms and their payloads become more expensive, mostly because today the trend is towards multi-purpose vehicles, rather than specialized systems. The payloads themselves include not only cameras, but various sensors, radars and communication systems – all integrrated into the same unmanned platform.

IHLS – Israel Homeland Security

Ben Eliahu went over a few of the challenges facing the autonomous vehicle world:

• Operating as many UAVs as possible over a small battle area.
• Cyber attacks against UAVs.
• A pilot can operate under radio silence, while UAVs must broadcast constantly.
• UAVs have no deterrence capabilities. Even 100 UAVs won’t have the same effect as 25 F-35 fighter jets.
• UAVs generate a lively public debate in the U.S. over human rights and environmental issues.

Is this the end of the manned aircraft era? I believe that combat helicopters will vanish soon, and the future of fighter jets is uncertain – but cargo and transport manned aircraft will go on: It’s hard to see unmanned vehicles take over their duties as well.