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> The kit utilizes a novel interface with the aircraft’s flight controls and mission systems, allowing a pilot to toggle between traditional human control and A

• nradov 3mo ago
  These are going to be experienced test pilots who are pretty good at actively managing autopilots and other automated systems. Plus they'll be backed up by telemetry to ground controllers. But ultimately the military is willing to accept some losses in order to advance key R&D programs.
  • rwmj 3mo ago
    Later they'll replace them with minimum wage safety pilots.
    • rgblambda 3mo ago
      Or outsource to a pilot procurement company in China. There is precedent after all: https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-tech-support-government-cybersecurity-china-doj-treasury https://www.propublica.org/article/microsoft-tech-support-go...
    • throwaway2037 3mo ago
      I doubt it. Ask yourself: Why does the RQ-4 Global Hawk or MQ-9 Reaper require so much training to operate? The operators are well-paid, highly skilled officers.
      • rwmj 3mo ago
        It's a joke about human "safety drivers" acting as legal crumple zones for self-driving cars.
      • tim333 3mo ago
        Those aren't really AI controlled. It's just remote control for regular jet aircraft.
    • DoesntMatter22 3mo ago
      What a silly statement to make. They'll just be replaced with AI. This is literally the plot of the Terminator
      • rwmj 3mo ago
        What The Terminator got wrong is each robot needs a human to take the legal blame when it goes wrong.
      • tim333 3mo ago
        First low wage humans then AI only. Think Waymo.
  • themanualstates 3mo ago
    At 1.000 targets / hour as specified, Pentagon's "software abstraction layer" (Maven Smart System) allotted μ=60ms to consider each (mass-) killing that was added to the 'kill-chain'. Regarding e.g. the 'double tap' strike on Minab's girls school, it's impossible for there to have been any 'management' considering it: 1. has been on Google Maps for over 15 years 2. ranked top on Google Search 3. was all-pink, even on satellite imagery N.v.m. how the certainty / fuzziness knobs are already being deployed more to generate media buzz for short-term political gains than tactical or strategic results. (https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blame-for-the-iran-school-bombing-the-truth-is-far-more-worrying https://www.theguardian.com/news/2026/mar/26/ai-got-the-blam...)
• pudgywalsh 3mo ago
  This stuff actually gets tested, it's not your typical web framework junk.
  • hansmayer 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • anthk 3mo ago
    So did Boeing airtoys, and NASA stuff lend to 3rd parties with no concept of a metric system. I trust machinery designed from Forth and Lisp hackers with TONS of background on CS science and hardware (and math, up to the point on being THE people creating most "new" technology and old ones such as the Floating Point IEEE standard).
• Ccecil 3mo ago
  Once the AI realizes it can do a maneuver the aircraft can survive but the "bossy meatbag" in the cockpit cannot...
  • tclancy 3mo ago
    “Don’t do it MaiV!”
• yellow_lead 3mo ago
  The Tesla method! Disengage shortly before a crash. Now the human is responsible for it.
  • Rover222 3mo ago
    When in reality, most FSD tesla crashes in the headlines are when humans take over.
    • gorjusborg 3mo ago
      [flagged]
    • exe34 3mo ago
      Yes, because the AI got them into a dangerous situation.
      • ACCount37 3mo ago
        That's straight up a lie. In all situations where autopilot was disengaged shortly before a crash, the autopilot is implicated in the crash. Both by Tesla's own standards and by NHTSA standards. And yet, people who really should know better repeat this as gospel.
        • fooey 3mo ago
          the Tesla standard is 5 seconds, NHTSA says 30 seconds Luckily, none of the Tesla data is available because they're currently getting away with redacting so much in their reports they're essentially useless
          • exe34 3mo ago
            Complete coincidence that Elon cut the funding for the department that was investigating Tesla: https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/nhtsas-self-driving-safety-staff-reportedly-disproportionally-affected-by-doge-cuts/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/10/nhtsas-self-driving-safety...
• wildzzz 3mo ago
  Probably a duplicate autopilot-like system that an AI controls. Flip a switch and controls revert back to the pilot. It may not even be a real switch, many planes disengage AP when you touch the controls. I doubt AI will be doing dogfighting anytime soon, this is likely just an AI following predetermined routes and maneuvers and making the choice on how to accomplish them. The great thing about computers is that they can process inputs faster than humans.
  • angry_octet 3mo ago
    That is underestimating it. DARPA already showed dogfighting that can beat humans in simulation, and they may allow this do execute that. However, dogfighting isn't very interesting, all combat occurs BVR and in the RF/EW domain. Pilots are already spending most of their time thinking about epistemic problems: can I see my opponent, can they see me, how do I deceive, am I being deceived, how do I avoid being detected/tracked/targeted/engaged, while possibly trying to do that to everything else. AI is not yet very good at that.
    • toxik 3mo ago
      Well, they showed better performance if the AI had full state observation... Not very practical.
      • angry_octet 3mo ago
        It's true. The WVR manoeuvring and tactics was the focus of the effort, and DARPA prefers to have short and well defined efforts. But I'm pretty sure the companies are working on techniques for red tactics estimation and behaviour identification.
• jryle70 3mo ago
  It's "human-on-the-loop experimentation", not mass production. Are you engineer? How do you experiment? I assume by pushing the boundaries step by step? How do you suggest they do testing if not by taking risk?
  • crm9125 3mo ago
    [dead]
• sandworm101 3mo ago
  Flying is not driving. Things dont happen as quickly. Kids dont step out in front of jets at 30,000 feet. Air is also homogenous. Pavement is not. Whereas a car must turn or die, a jet can generally fly straight and level without issue while problems get solved. An out-of-control car has maybe three seconds before a collision. A jet will generally have over a minute to get back under control. Sure, there are moments. Landing and takeoff are very time sensitive operations, but those also occur in protected environments, sanitized of the random issues that cars must deal with. And the AI isnt doing all the flying. The aircraft has many protective systems to assist the pilot regardless of who that pilot may be. (Stable aerodynamics, anti-stall limits, control lockouts etc.)
  • mrob 3mo ago
    >Stable aerodynamics The F-16 is famously the first production aircraft with unstable aerodynamics, to increase maneuverability. It's not flyable without computer assistance. This is standard for all modern fighter jets.
    • Terr_ 3mo ago
      I think we need to start distinguishing between different qualitative grades of "computer assistance" here. The executive decision of "fly north instead of east" is on a different tier than "increase angle of flap more than normal to compensate for under-performing in prior maneuver." In the broadest sense, my car is not drive-able without computer assistance either, because if you burn out the computers the engine won't start.
      • Onavo 3mo ago
        But your average Cessna lawnmower engine is perfectly startable without computer assistance.
        • kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 3mo ago
          So is my 80 year old car. But like the Cessna, it's suited to a vastly different role than a Lamborghini.
• cco 3mo ago
  The switch is not novel, that is in fact exactly how autopilot works for any aircraft. The pilot toggles it on and off and the autopilot itself may turn itself off if certain situations occur. To your point, that isn't without problems, but it certainly isn't novel. It is very standard and boring. I would bet this is pure marketing speak and there really isn't anything special here. "Follow this flight plan and do so within this flight envelope" is pretty straightforward?
• nunez 3mo ago
  F-16's CFIT reminds me of Boeing's Controlled Impact Demo in the 80s out of Edwards AFB: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Impact_Demonstration https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Controlled_Impact_Demonstratio...
  • throwaway2037 3mo ago
    I never heard about this experiment before your post. An interesting quote from that Wiki page: > During those same flights, NASA's Dryden Flight Research Center also developed the remote piloting techniques necessary for the Boeing 720 to fly as a drone aircraft. An initial attempt at the full-scale test was scrubbed in late 1983 due to problems with the uplink connection to the 720; if the uplink failed the ground-based pilot would no longer have control of the aircraft. Think for a moment how hard it was to fly that aeroplane as a remote control drone in... wait for it... 1984! Computers were so primitive in the 1980s.
• angry_octet 3mo ago
  It doesn't, flying these is potentially very dangerous, there are many non-recoverable situations. But AFRL/NASA has been working on this for decades. The manoeuvres the higher level AI requests are actioned by highly assured dynamical systems solvers using model predictive control, like the autopilot, that maintain the aircraft in the safe envelope. The unknowns in this system are (a) how agressive is the flight controller? (b) how clever is the autonomy?
  • EvanAnderson 3mo ago
    The flight control system in modern fighter jets makes human-induced departure from controlled flight difficult to get into. That's the point of the system. There's a good F-22 pilot talk recorded at MIT a few years ago you might enjoy. The pilot described the F-22 as the easiest aircraft he's ever flown because the flight control system handles many of the considerations (stress on the airframe, staying out of attitudes that would deviate, etc) you'd have to be mindful of in lower-tech aircraft. He talked about being more comfortable putting a non-pilot into a Raptor vs. a 172. Edit: I believe this is the talk: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-687-private-pilot-ground-school-january-iap-2019/resources/special-lecture-f-22-flight-controls/ https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/16-687-private-pilot-ground-scho...
    • angry_octet 3mo ago
      It is definitely possible to escape the safe flight envelope in a a stock F-16 though. The F-22/F-35 are significantly newer. Even with a new system, stability through transonic while manoeuvring is hard, the aircraft will experience buffet, and the meat bag may have been subject to a number of high G turns. The problem is that recovery may need to happen after already departing controlled flight. Differences between the modelled aircraft and the actual aircraft, e.g. due to icing, linearization effects on inherently non-linear systems, sensor error, actuator wear, etc, can lead to incorrect predictions, and hence moving to parts of the envelope which are not assured.
• EvanAnderson 3mo ago
  A computer is "flying" the F-16 all the time anyway. It's a statically unstable aircraft. I wonder if the AI control is giving inputs to the same flight controls system a human pilot would, or if it has a lower-level interface that could bypass the control laws in the human-operated system. On one hand you might be interested in the AI coming up with ways to fly the aircraft that the normal control laws don't allow, but on the other hand you don't want the AI coming up with exciting new ways to depart from controlled flight (potentially in unrecoverable attitudes) with a pilot in the very expensive aircraft (even if the pilot could eject, which is an endeavor fraught with risk to life and limb). Edit: Presumably since there's a pilot in the aircraft the AI must be bound by at least some of the regular control laws that prevent the pilot from doing maneuvers that would, from a G-loading perspective, be incompatible with human life. At least one would hope. I don't think I'd go flying with a virtual pilot that was capable of flying the aircraft in a manner that could kill me but otherwise leave the aircraft intact.
  • Mawr 3mo ago
    > A computer is "flying" the F-16 all the time anyway. It's a statically unstable aircraft. Ugh... I... Are you serious? Sure, in some sense AI is a computer and the fancy state machine that compensates for inherent flight instability is a computer also. But to equate the two is ridiculous.
    • Daneel_ 3mo ago
      I don't think they're equating it, moreso saying that, on a technicality, it's already a computer that's always flying the plane, but that the AI and the flight control system are quite different. It's a fair comment given that they'd just been talking about how the AI might control the plane - will it give inputs to the state machine or have direct control over all flight systems? One would strongly assume the inputs must be to the state machine. ..but oh boy wouldn't it be interesting to just hand it full systems control!
      • superxpro12 3mo ago
        eh.... its a computer insofar as like.... there's some software functions doing extremely well defined, limited things faster than a human could. but to imply that the f16 flight software (which is ancient btw) is anything like this "AI" is really misleading at best.
• deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
• mjanx123 3mo ago
  Thats a standard cookie cutter statement intended to give an impression of safety.