Piloting Drone Aircraft is ‘Not Like a Video Game,’ Say Pilots

Chris Cole, director of the Drone Wars website, argues that the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in use in military operations against Taliban and Al Qaeda forces in the Middle East promote a “Playstation Mentality.”

Young military personnel raised on a diet of video games now kill real people remotely using joysticks. Far removed from the human consequences of their actions, how will this generation of fighters value the right to life?

Drone pilots, such as those in the United Kingdom’s RAF, bristle at such a suggestion. Stationed remotely thousands of miles from where their planes are flying, these RAF pilots –many of whom are middle-aged family men– work in eight hour shifts from server room cockpits, studying the video feeds sent back via satellite and communicating with Afghanistan ground control over IRC. Pains are taken to establish the airforce atmosphere: pilots sit in leather flight seats and wear flight suits, and while the pilots do navigate the planes by way of Xbox 360-styled joysticks, there is no idle chatter, far less any trash talk.

“I’ve had the accusation levelled that it’s a Star Wars game,” says RAF Reaper pilot Oz who comes from three tours of duty in reconnaisance fast-jets. “It’s anything but. If we act like it’s Star Wars, there are people in the command centre watching us and listening to what we do. The taking of human life is not something to be considered lightly. OK, they are bad guys we are killing, but they are still human beings.”

The Telegraph’s Rob Blackhurst notes that the RAF no longer uses the word “compound” to describe civilian buildings they happen to surveil: “It obscures the simple truth that these are houses. As one senior commander told me, ‘We’re trying to get it into the guys’ heads that this is not compound no 28, it’s 34 Acacia Drive – so you don’t hit it.'”

It’s a far cry from the adrenaline-addled, Mountain Dew chugging core gamer “Playstation Mentality” Cole decries. More than anything, pilots report growing exhausted from the sheer tedium of the job.

Does it get boring? Winston, the US Reaper pilot, admits, ‘The honest answer is yes. You may get information that the unit is going into an area in three days and you’re told, “Don’t take your eyes off that building.” So you will fly in a circle for an eight-hour shift looking at it […] You try and find humorous things. You see kids getting into fights and you’ll watch that, or traffic jams where some guy moves his goats across the road and people get upset.’

A few things go unstated: whether it’s truly ungamelike given how much drone piloting commands focus and patience, to say nothing of whether it’s appropriate that the West be an occupying force in the region. Surely, the drone pilots are fighting “the bad guys,” and the RAF seem quite committed to avoiding civilian casualties, but is a multi-million dollar machine filled with and run by expensive electronic hardware, the manufacture of which fuels violent conflicts elsewhere in the world, really a sterling example of ethical best practices?

Whatever the overarching issues, it seems clear that the actual pilots at the controls take their jobs very seriously.

Via Business Insider.

Header via UK Crown.