Flying Blind

At precisely 0600 hours most mornings, Lt. Col. Michael J. Guidry's CD alarm clock snaps on, and he's up and headed to his job testing the most revolutionary airplane ever built. Using his truck's cruise control to keep him from hotdogging down the Mojave Desert roads, Guidry traverses Edwards Air Force Base, driving right by the spot where the original Right Stuff man himself, Chuck Yeager, landed the Bell X-1 after breaking the sound barrier in 1947, and arrives at the hangar where the 21st-century version of flying glory, the RQ-4A Global Hawk, waits for him. Although Guidry's plane resembles the sleek 1950s U-2 spy plane in length, height, and weight, the plane of the future looks a lot more like a killer whale than a flying machine. It's not exactly fast either. Powered by a single conventional Rolls-Royce Allison jet engine that musters a modest 7,150 pounds of thrust, it can't outpace a common Boeing 737 jetliner. One look and it's obvious why Guidry and others affectionately refer to it as Shamu. Nonetheless, there's a powerful reason to be impressed by the Global Hawk. This whale flies blind. Guidry doesn't board the aircraft. No one does. The Global Hawk has no cockpit. It flies itself. Guidry and his colleagues sit in a cramped camouflaged trailer called the Mission Control Element. They have no joysticks, throttles, or pedals. They don't even have a pilot's-eye view from the plane: The Global Hawk has no forward-facing camera. It makes its own decisions about how to fly. And it is successful enough at that to raise a larger question certain to become part of most commercial airline passengers' futures: Are pilots obsolete? And if they're no longer needed, will passengers accept flying without them? "There is no question that we will be able to operate aircraft automatically," says R. John Hansman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "We are already doing it." Today's commercial autopilots are so sophisticated that "if you taxi out to the center line in a 777 and tell it to take off, you don't have to touch the stick again until you start braking on the roll out" at the arrival airport. The Global Hawk is the first completely "man-out-of-the-loop airplane," says Guidry, who still marvels at the ability of two onboard computers to take off, fly, and land with more grace than humans can call up. His blind whale has already proved so capable as a long-duration surveillance craft over Afghanistan that Pentagon planners are eager to complete the testing of two more-advanced pilotless fighter planes.