Thursday, July 09, 2009

Notional F/A-XX: F/A-18E/F Replacement


On the heels of the Russian designer putting out how he thinks the PAK FA will look like, Boeing has put out what they currently think a 6th Generation Fighter will look like, one intended to replace the F/A-18E/F for the USN. Optionally manned is one of the key words here. I'm pretty convinced that it really ought to be completely unmanned. In fact, what they ought to be doing is having something like the old Vikings flying off the decks to control or coordinate the UCAVs.

One thought I had on the whole fighter concept was to have very fast UAVs that could close much faster than a manned platform for visual ID (possibly even expendable ones) and a manned control plane (E-2, whatever) and a few fat missile carriers that would follow long unmanned as well. UAV IDs target, man in the loop on control plane says yea or nay, missileer fires. Preferably there's a laser on the manned planned to tag obnoxious jerks and incoming missiles. Sounds vaguely FCS though.

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