Annapolis Beats USAFA in Aircraft Design Competition
The US Naval Academy at Annapolis won a Boeing-sponsored inter-service academy competition to design a futuristic aircraft cockpit:
The competition, now in its second year, required each academy’s team to design the cockpit of an aircraft for a mission nearly 30 years in the future. The 2012 award was presented by President and CEO of Boeing Defense, Space and Security Dennis Muilenburg.
The company asked each academy’s team to design the cockpit that could control a futuristic aircraft similar as well as unmanned aerial and ground vehicles while conducting a typical air-to-ground and air-to-air strike mission.
USAFA won last year.
Hello. I’ve read through the article you linked to about the Annapolis competition, but I can’t find any public images of the previous years’ submissions or winners. Is this because all submissions are automatically state property and considered potentially useful for future national defence designs?
It’s a real shame because this story could be much more engaging if we could see some of the work previously submitted :(
From the article… “Imagine a pilot flying with a 3-D image of the battle space, and he can see in 3-D threats, targets, mountains, terrain, roads,” said Hamilton. “You’re going to have the ability to control multiple unmanned aircraft who are your wingmen through artificial intelligence. You’ll have a lot of automation. You’ll basically be able to do the job of six or seven people by yourself.” … this immediately made me think of Ender’s Game. You should definitely give it a read if you haven’t already. It talks a lot about the possibilities of controlling teams remotely and the issues that come with being emotionally removed from the combat.
It’s probably not too far away that we see remote control or automation in private jet flights since it would allow for long-haul trips without pilot tireness or error. Of course, it will have to go through such rigourous testing for safety reasons, but we’re already seeing automated cars (I think Google has tested them properly in America.)