On the frontlines with US drone pilots: a console but no video game
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Version 0 of 1. Lieutenant Matthew, 23, is the face of the new generation of US fighter pilot. He dresses in the familiar single-piece olive green uniform worn by Tom Cruise in Top Gun, and like Cruise’s character, Maverick, he flies missions over war zones with multi-million dollar aircraft. But Matthew – due to air force security rules, he did not give his last name – has never felt the G-forces of a fighter jet or flown at supersonic speeds. His background is not in flying, but in civil engineering. He sits behind a bank of digital screens rather than in a cockpit. And instead of a control stick, he uses a mouse. In other words, Matthew is a computer geek. He is a pilot with the 69th Reconnaissance Group stationed at Grand Forks air force base in North Dakota. His job is to fly Global Hawks, the unmanned surveillance drones that act as the frontline intelligence gatherers – the eyes and – of the US military. Every day Matthew flies a Global Hawk remotely from his computer console, steering it with his mouse over a militarily significant part of the globe, from where the aircraft’s powerful sensors stream back precision images of enemy targets to air force headquarters. (He was not allowed to identify the countries in which he is currently flying.) He says that although he is usually thousands of miles away from the location in which he is operating, he takes a keen interest in the geography. “You want to know which areas are dangerous and where there’s a risk of being shot down,” he says. But surely there can’t be the same kind of adrenaline rush flying an aircraft remotely through cyberspace as there would be if you were physically present in the plane and your own life were at stake? “I do get nervous,” he says. “It’s not like I’m personally in danger, obviously. But there are nerves because you want to do a proper job. I’m in charge of a very expensive aircraft with people underneath who could be hurt or killed if I crashed. That keeps you focused.” The Global Hawks do not carry weapons. But they are intimately involved in the deadly work of the US military, acting as intelligence gatherers for forces on the ground as well as pinpointing targets for bombers. Does he feel, as he sits at his computer console, that he is part of a military effort – that there is a “fighter” component to his title of “fighter pilot”? “I’m not taking lives, so I’m a step back in my mind. I see it as protecting people’s lives,” he said. The Guardian asked Matthew’s superior, Captain Brad (who also withheld his last name), why the group is dressed in the single-piece uniforms that symbolise the combat-readiness of the traditional air force pilot when today they spend all day indoors in front of computer screens. Isn’t all that Top Gun stuff unnecessary in the age of the drone? “We wear the uniform because they tell us to,” he said. When not on active missions over Afghanistan or Iraq, the Global Hawks are maintained in a hangar in the Grand Forks base. They make a jaw-dropping, if inelegant, spectacle. With their gargantuan 131-feet wingspan, and lumpy bodies, they have none of the brutal sleekness of conventional manned fighter jets, resembling nothing so much as a featherless chicken. But they do well what they were designed to do: endurance flying at high altitudes. This summer a team at Grand Forks broke the record for distance flying, keeping a Global Hawk in the air without refueling for 34 hours straight. And with their formidable array of sensor equipment – including electro-optical and infrared cameras, synthetic aperture radar and ground moving target indicator radar – the aircraft can detect individual people and trucks moving on the ground from 60,000 feet. It is an indication of the power of drones to revolutionize the way humans do business, in this case warfare, that the arrival of the Global Hawks has entirely transformed Grand Forks air force base. Until four years ago the base was a centre for conventional piloted aircraft, specifically the KC-135 refueling tankers that are used to keep fighter jets aloft. But within a year, all manned planes at Grand Forks had been replaced by the Global Hawks. Today, the 1,700 active duty military personnel on the base focus their energies specifically on operating the drones. “We see ourselves as the base of the future,” said Colonel Paul Bauman, commander of the host unit, the 319th air base wing. Around the globe, the US is operating a total of 32 Global Hawks, 10 of which are attached to Grand Forks. Nasa also has one of the drones to study the Earth’s atmosphere, the US navy has a maritime version, and Europe too is moving into the Global Hawk business with its own variant, the EuroHawk. “The Global Hawk is becoming the backbone of high-altitude long endurance surveillance in the US military. The fleet is growing very rapidly,” said Philip Finnegan, director of corporate analysis at the Teal Group, which specializes in the aerospace market. Grand Forks air force base is unique because it also houses MQ-9 Predator drones that are used by Customs and Border Patrol for surveillance over the Canadian and Mexican borders. The unmanned planes are kitted out with Vader, a type of radar that senses changes on the ground and can be programmed to detect people walking or running. The technology was developed to track insurgents in Afghanistan, but is now being deployed to look for people illegally entering the US across the Mexican border in the Sonora desert. The Predators are also equipped with synthetic aperture radar that allows border agents to detect the movement of vehicles that might be carrying drugs. “The Predators can tell us the vehicle type, number of people on the ground, but it can’t identify the person or read a license plate,” said a CBP air interdiction agent who asked not to be named because he is involved in undercover drug investigations. The switch from manned aircraft to drones has dramatically changed the culture of the air force base. Bauman observed that many of the most visceral elements of life in the air force have simply disappeared. “Airmen are used to what we call the ‘sights and sounds of freedom’ – whether jet engines going full after-burner, big heavy aircraft landing, maintenance doing engine tests all hours of day and night. You see them, you hear them. With the Global Hawks, you don’t have that sight or sound. So when airmen come from other bases, they say they don’t see or feel the mission as they traditionally would. We are constantly reminding our airmen that they may not be able to hear or see it, but it’s happening.” It’s even stranger, Bauman says, for air force pilots like Matthew. “They leave their base house in the morning, drive three minutes to their building, walk into their big metal box filled with computers, and they are immediately transported into the desert in central command, or into Pacific command, or southern command. They are taking over a Global Hawk on a mission on the other side of the world. They fly that mission and then they walk out of the box and are back again in North Dakota.” It makes him wonder sometimes, Bauman added: “Where’s the frontline? Is it outside Baghdad or Kabul? Or is it right here, as you walk out of your base house in Grand Forks?” So much has changed. From Matthew’s perspective, is flying a Global Hawk closer to the world of Top Gun or to playing video game? He didn’t have any hesitation in answering that question: “It would be so awesome if it was anything like a video game, but it’s not. It’s stressful. Ninety percent of the time it’s pretty slow-paced on an average mission. But then suddenly something goes wrong, and it’s game on.” |