The US military conducted a dogfight between a piloted aircraft and a modified F-16 fighter jet controlled by artificial intelligence in a ground-breaking test.
A heavily modified two-seat F-16D X-62A, also known as the X-62A Variable Stability In-Flight Simulator Test Aircraft (VISTA), competed in the air with another F-16 fighter jet. The US military said the tests showed how machine learning could transform the way fighter jets conduct combat operations.
In a video released Wednesday by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), two fighter jets can be seen manoeuvring around each other in the sky at a speed of about 1,900 km per hour. The self-piloted aircraft performed defensive and offensive manoeuvres, approaching the manned aircraft at a distance of approximately 600 m.
It was all part of a test that began at Edwards Air Force Base in Kern County, California last September. The U.S. military has not disclosed which of the F-16s won the VAS dogfight, commonly known as a dogfight.
The test marked a breakthrough in DARPA’s Air Combat Evolution (ACE) program, which has been developing autonomous combat systems with aircraft controlled by artificial intelligence since its inception in 2019, The Debrief reported.
“Things are progressing as well or even faster than we hoped,” Lt. Col. Ryan Heffron, DARPA’s ACE program manager, told reporters on Friday, but “we can’t provide more details.” Frank Kendall, US Air Force Secretary, said in a video released by DARPA that the X-62A team demonstrated how machine learning-based autonomy “can be safely used to perform dynamic combat manoeuvres.”
The ACE program, launched in December 2022, has completed 21 test flights, resulting in changes to more than 100,000 lines of flight-critical software.
At a US Senate hearing in April, Kendall said that later this year he would “take a ride in an autonomously piloted F-16” with a pilot who would simply observe the technology at work. “Hopefully, neither he nor I will have to fly the plane,” Kendall said.
Bill Gray, chief test pilot at the U.S. Air Force Test Pilot School, said the X-62 Ace program is about more than just aerial combat. “The dogfights were a problem that needed to be solved before we could start testing autonomous artificial intelligence systems in the air,” Gray said in the video, but the research “is about every challenge that can be posed to an autonomous system.”
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