US Army trainers teaching soldiers to fly drones are trying to get them to rewire their brains so that they can master a form of flying and fighting unlike piloting conventional aircraft.
Soldiers first learn to fly drones on simulators and, when they get good enough, transition to live flight. One of their biggest challenges is adjusting to the unfamiliar sensation of remote flight.
Maj. Rachel Martin, director of the US Army’s new drone lethality course, the service’s effort to catch up on drone warfare, told Business Insider that “I think the biggest skill gap still that comes with the flight is learning how to fly with goggles.”
When flying a first-person-view (FPV) drone, “you are looking through a small camera on the front of the aircraft, and you are not receiving physical inputs of what that aircraft is doing.”
Rethinking flight
Soldiers are “training, quite frankly, new neural pathways on what it’s like to see something that you can’t personally feel — the aircraft’s turning right or the aircraft’s turning left — like you would with driving a car or riding a bike.” Conventional aircraft give physical feedback, but they’re not getting that here.
Students are trying to make “sure that your brain understands what it’s visually seeing,” Martin said, and their physical reactions reveal the effort involved.
“When we’re in the simulator, if a student’s turning left, you’ll see a lot of students turning their body as they’re flying. They’re not in the aircraft, but their body wants to feel like what they’re seeing.”
The students instinctively move as though they were sitting inside a jet or helicopter rather than controlling a small aircraft from a distance.
Helicopter pilots can physically feel the aircraft banking, climbing, or turning as they fly, Martin said. Drone pilots receive none of those sensory cues, making remote flight “a new skill level” for most people without prior drone experience.
The gap becomes less of an issue for most pilots after they’ve completed the simulation training, Martin said. “Usually, the people who do well in the simulator do very well in the aircraft itself, and they don’t need as much additional training.”
The biggest challenge, she said, is “the technical skill of flying.” The training course, which has an evolving curriculum, is designed to prepare the US for drone warfare, which Martin described as a “style of warfare that we’re accustomed to.”
Starting on the simulator first
For some infantry soldiers who aren’t already drone enthusiasts, “it’s like learning to ride a bike for the first time,” Martin said. “It takes multiple iterations, and, eventually, you gain that confidence and your skills.”
The skills “mature as you put more hours into the process, which is another reason we put so many hours into a simulator that we use to teach the technical aspects of flight. So they get 20 to 30 hours in that simulator before they ever get on a live flight.”
US allies are similarly relying on simulators to build drone expertise.
Lt. Col. Ben Irwin-Clark, the commanding officer of the 1st Battalion of the Irish Guards, an elite British Army infantry regiment, told Business Insider that the advice Ukrainian soldiers gave the unit was that a competent pilot needs at least 30 hours on a simulator and 30 hours flying in the field.
At that 60-hour point, “they are pretty competent at being able to fly different types of drones,” he said.
Simulators are important for practical reasons, too, Maj. Wolf Amacker, who leads the US Army’s Unmanned Aircraft Systems and Tactics Branch at the Aviation Center of Excellence, told Business Insider.
“Yes, FPVs are cheap” compared with other weaponry, typically costing a few hundred dollars to a few thousand dollars each, he said.
However, “you don’t want to have someone get on it for the first time and absolutely smash it and wreck it and lose $2,000 when you can take a $20 video game and get someone really good after 20 to 30 hours are good enough to where they can then safely and effectively fly that aircraft.”
That said, militaries must also adjust to another reality of drone aviation. Some aircraft will inevitably crash or be destroyed during training.
Martin said the US Army must be “willing to accept that some of these systems will get attrited in training is normal.”
Irwin-Clark, likewise, said accepting attrition is necessary for effective training.
As his battalion receives more drones, “we are deliberately crashing them into nets and crashing them into targets” in training. The unit repairs what it can afterward.
That represents a major mindset shift for militaries accustomed to carefully protecting their assets. Irwin-Clark said military leaders typically try to safeguard new technology and tightly control who can test it. Drones demand a different approach.
Just about anyone can learn to fly
Martin said one of the course’s key lessons is that people from a wide range of backgrounds can become good drone pilots.
“In the first iteration of the course in August, we put that to the test. We received a lot of students who’ve never flown one before and some that had.”
The trainers separated them into groups based on experience. “And I think what we found and what assumptions we tested is that regardless of military occupation, specialty, or MOS, and regardless of age — because we did have some contractors that are in their sixties come and get training as well — that a good majority of people can learn how to do this and do it well.”
There were only a “very small percentage of students that just weren’t capable and were unsafe with those systems,” Martin said.
“We had 28 students or 29 students, and out of those students, only four of them never made it to the advanced group,” she said. “And I think that’s a pretty low percentage. We thought it was going to be like half.”
Ukrainian drone schools have similarly told Business Insider that although the best pilots are typically young people who play video games and have a technical background that helps them understand the systems, people of any age and background can be trained to be effective pilots.
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