RE: [FH] Breaking News - Dogfights Galore

You just cycle pilots on and off duty faster, perhaps 2 hours on, 10
hours off.  As soon as your shift ends, you are taken out of combat and
allowed to rest.  You'd need 6 shifts of pilots, but you could then
maintain a high pace (probably higher than the mechanics can keep up)
for extended periods of time.

Remember that current combat flying is 99% boredom and 1% sheer terror,
remote piloted aircraft will have a much higher action rate with the
boring parts taken over by computers and AI's while the human pilots are
only called in for the "exciting" parts.

Burn-out for a teen-ager is not much of a problem as most can run 12-16
hours playing video games, sleep a couple of hours and go at it again. 
If you limit them to 2 hour stints, they could probably go indefinitely,
and you will more than likely have more of an issue of keeping them away
from video games during their off-hours than them burning out from
flying.

In addition, if physical attributes are less necessary to fill the
position, then you have a much larger potential pool of pilots than
current militaries have (i.e. you don't need perfect vision, you can
have a heart murmur, you don't have be a certain height or weight
etc...) and with VR training, you could have thousands of combat pilots
on tap.  Or you go down the street of Ender's Game and don't tell the
trainee's that they are flying real planes...

--Binhan

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-gzg-l@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU
[mailto:owner-gzg-l@lists.CSUA.Berkeley.EDU]On Behalf Of Nicholas
Caldwell
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 12:54 PM
To: gzg-l@csua.berkeley.edu
Subject: Re: [FH] Breaking News - Dogfights Galore

Loved this one!  Great job, Beth.  

You know, I read some interesting articles about the pace of the air war
in Iraq where it sounded like the only time the pilots had to rest on
some days was when their planes were being refuelled.  What happens when
even that time is cut to near zero by technology like this?  

nick