Blake Hall
Want to fly and be Goose and Maverick and Iceman and defend the United States of America as a member of its mighty Air Force? If you do, your chances increased significantly Thursday after USAF officials announced this: they’re now allowing enlisted personnel to fly “remotely-piloted vehicles” — you probably know them as drones.
(Okay so it’s not exactly Top Gun but, you’re in no shape to pull off the volleyball scene anyway)
Why have they done this you ask? It’s pretty simple. There’s a drone pilot crisis. There’s simply not enough personnel to fly all these unmanned flying machines America has skimming the globe, spying, dropping bombs and whatever else.
This from Foxtrot Alpha:
This new initiative will be tested within the RQ-4 Global Hawk community, whose pilots really don’t “fly” the aircraft at all: they direct it via desktop interface more than anything else. Still, this is a big step for the USAF which has for decades kept the flying excursively to its officer corps.
The RQ-4 is purely a surveillance platform and is unarmed, but still the USAF says that we should not expect armed drones to remain solely in the hands of officers either. This first step with the Global Hawk will help inform USAF leadership if they should continue to blend enlisted pilots with officers in other remotely piloted aircraft communities.
The Force is so desperate to keep the officers it has flying drones right now that recently they’ve offered them a bonus of $125,000 to pilot their aircraft for another five years, according to the New York Post.