U.S. Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall takes flight in AI-controlled F-16

We tend to use AI and we think of it like it’s a thing. It’s really software that works. It does very complicated tasks and using new technologies that involve very powerful computing and advanced mathematics to solve problems that you couldn’t solve previously with computers. Basically the way we’re using the, the artificial intelligence, the automation is, you know, we set up a situation for an engagement, if you will, and then we turn the automation on and we let it control the airplane for some period of time, a minute or two perhaps during the engagement. And then you turn it back off. And there were a number of safety features that you know what altitude we have to be at, how close we can get to the other airplane where it turns itself off or we would take control away from it too. I wasn’t terribly worried about the the risk of the autonomy. This aircraft in the X62 has one purpose, which is to advance the state of machine learning. So on the back there you can see a component that’s a little bit different than what you see on most F sixteens. It has there a whole series of computers that are designed to provide an autonomy sandbox. This aircraft really allows us to take relatively immature machine learning tools and agents and place them airborne, and to do that in a safe manner. The computer is not going to get tired. It’s not scared, it’s it’s going to follow its rules and do as, as close to a perfect maneuver as it can do. Whereas the humans are always going to have some variability in how they perform. Miss Kendall is a graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point. We have to graduate. And then I got into research and development and one of my very first assignments semantically, and I think we got a lot to learn there, get a long way to go, but you’re at a start of a really exciting, I think, period of time for for aircraft. We will be able to use these uncrewed aircraft tactically in ways we would not want to use accrued aircraft. And they’re not expendable. We’re not throwing them away. We’re going to reuse them. That’s the intent. But we can let them be attrited. We can put them in places where some of them are intentionally sacrificed in order to draw fire or to find out where the other side is, to find out where the enemy is. And I think our pilots in general appreciate that that’s going to give them a competitive advantage. I think we are in a race for technological superiority. This is a feature of that race. It’s one of the factors that that matter. I think we’re competitive, but I don’t have 100% confidence that we’re ahead or certainly not ahead by a by a large margin. We have to keep running and we have to run fast. The Spitfire on the other hand.