U.S. Air Force Capt. Ryan Ward doesn’t get to fire his weapons often. A former B-1 bomber pilot, for three years he has piloted an MQ-9 Reaper, an unmanned aircraft armed to the teeth with missiles and laser-guided bombs. His missions tend to be surveillance, armed reconnaissance and armed overwatch, flying over ground troops in case they need some quick firepower. But though Ward is always poised to strike, the strikes are infrequent.

“I’ve been involved in a few missions where I’ve been called upon to deliver weapons. But I wouldn’t say we go out there with the thought that we’re going to employ weapons on a mission,” he said.

Maintaining weapons proficiency for armed UAV crews is key, especially as concern has mounted over civilian casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan from Hellfire missile strikes launched from unmanned aircraft. The Air Force says lessons learned from combat indicate that weapons training for UAV crews needs to focus more on basic skills.

The basics can include such things as “making sure he’s planned his attack so that his wings are level at release, making sure that he has enough speed, making sure that his nose is pointed in the right direction so the Hellfire has an opportunity to see the laser spot,” said Maj. Bryan Callahan, chief of Predator and Reaper operations for U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command.

“When you have a guy who is trained up and comes out of the FTU [formal training unit] and he’s qualified to bring down weapons now, and he goes without firing weapons for months and months, those skills atrophy,” Callahan said. “He will practice as much as he can, but we see a lot of back-to-basics [errors] that we would like to reduce.”

Callahan also expects more attention to accuracy. “Bringing a weapon with no issues or concerns, that’s pretty vanilla. Bringing down a weapon in close proximity to friendly forces or [on] a challenging target is something else,” he said.

“Something else” also means flying an aircraft 7,000 miles away from a control station in Nevada. Though most Predator and Reaper pilots are experienced fliers of manned aircraft, moving to the robotic side presents new challenges. Tactical speed for a manned fighter is about 600 miles per hour, depending on the mission. Tactical speed for a Reaper is less than 200 miles per hour.

“In my F-16, if the JTAC [joint terminal air controller] is screaming for a weapon right now, it’s easy to just roll my wings, put the target on the nose and bring something down quickly,” said Callahan, a veteran F-16 and UAV pilot. With an unmanned aircraft, “you’ve got to be thinking ahead quite a bit more. We’re slow and static. I have to be thinking that if this guy needs fire now, I need to be able to put this airplane in a position to bring that fire down at all times.”

Then there are the tensions between ISR and strike missions. A Reaper may have to orbit a target closely to obtain video, but that may be too close to friendly troops to release a bomb.

“If the ground force wants me tucked up and close to have a better view of something, that probably takes away the GBU-12 [laser-guided bomb], where I’m too close to drop this bomb,” Callahan said. “So if the JTAC wants that bomb in the next 30 seconds, he’s not going to get it because I have to drive out and then drive back in to drop it.”

UAV pilots also must learn to deal with delayed response from an aircraft on the other side of the world.

“If I tell it to bank left or drop bomb, there is a delay. It’s less of a problem for me than [for] my sensor operator, because he’s the guy keeping the crosshairs on the target,” he said. “And if you think about something like a Hellfire missile, it is such a scalpel as compared to a big bomb going off, that if your crosshairs aren’t exactly where you want them, you won’t get the effect that you need.”

Each Predator and Reaper crew includes a pilot, who is an officer responsible for controlling the aircraft and weapons, and a sensor operator, usually an enlisted airman, who controls the aircraft’s cameras and target designators.

Situational awareness

The most obvious difference between manned and unmanned aircraft is situational awareness, or the simple ability to look out of the cockpit window and see what’s going on. The Air Force is receiving its first batch of UAV pilots fresh out of flight training, who haven’t spent much time in manned aircraft. Experienced pilots can compensate, but it will be a challenge for the rookies.

“This is one of those things that we’re just getting our arms around,” Callahan said. “How do we give those guys that airborne perspective so they can start connecting the dots between look where your airplane is, look where your sensors are pointing, look where your nose is pointing, and put them all together so you can put a weapon down rapidly and accurately?”

All Predator and Reaper crews receive weapons training. The Predator can carry two Hellfires, the Reaper can carry four Hellfires and two 500-pound GBU-12s, with fitting underway for the GBU-38 Joint Direct Attack Munition. Missions are flown by the 432nd Air Expeditionary Wing at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada, which has four operational squadrons: the 15th and 18th Reconnaissance Squadrons fly the Predator, the 17th Reconnaissance Squadron flies both the Predator and Reaper, and the 42nd Attack Squadron flies the Reaper.

Training recently moved from Creech to Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico.

“Typically the MQ-1 FTU is going to concentrate on their bread and butter, which is ISR and full-motion video,” Callahan said. “They’re going to flavor that syllabus with some [close air support], armed overwatch and armed reconnaissance training, and a little bit of SCAR,” or strike coordination and reconnaissance.

The MQ-9, on the other hand, is “a bit more weapon-centric. Their training mirrors that. So they have a lot more flexible training with their weapons and train into a large scale of mission sets,” he said.

Ward, the former B-1 pilot, says his primary mission is ISR.

“As a Reaper pilot, we take off with a full load of weapons every time. But our main focus is the nontraditional ISR aspect, which is being able to provide the real-time video footage of what is going on the ground, with the ability to stay over the target area for a long period of time,” he said. “As an added bonus, if that area becomes a hot spot and they need weapons on the ground, the Reaper has the ability to move almost seamlessly from an ISR role to a weapons delivery aircraft.”

Seamless transition — the ability to move abruptly from surveillance to strike on a mission — is what Ryan would like UAV training to emphasize. “You can start off in an ISR role for the day and, by the time you’re done with your six- or seven-hour shift, you could have visited six or seven different types of mission execution phases,” he said.

Crews need to be able instantly switch mental gears, which in turn requires mastery of basic flying and weapons skills.

“You almost have to have the basics as second nature so you can have your mind on what’s important at that point,” Ward said.

When Ward flew a B-1, flight time was so limited that he would try to string together several training objectives on the same flight. He would like to see UAV training conducted the same way.

Though most Reaper missions don’t feature a weapons launch, and tighter rules of engagement mean even fewer chances now, crews still find a chance to train.

“Even in a situation where it’s not a designated target, we can talk to the ground commander and say, ‘In order to make sure that we’re ready for you guys at any point, let’s find something here and work a simulated strike off of it,’” Ward said. “It could be as little as the pilot and sensor operator talking about the what-ifs of a scenario, like what if the ground commander came under fire from that building. Or it could be as robust as the JTAC or supporting unit playing along, and giving us a scenario, and us explaining verbally how we would do it and going through some of the motions.”