Boeing didn’t mention it, but Christopher Pyne did: the company’s Airpower Teaming System could be armed.

Australia’s then defence minister, speaking at the unveiling of the ATS in February 2019, omitted details of kinetic missions that might be undertaken by the aircraft, a ‘loyal wingman’ drone. But they’re not hard to guess. Most obviously, they would be attacks on relatively easy surface targets but also, quite possibly, shooting down low-performance aircraft.

Since the drone should be cheap, it could also be used against valuable targets that are so heavily defended that an operator dare not use crewed aircraft against them.

Boeing is developing the ATS in Australia for the global market. If the concept proves sound, the Royal Australian Air Force is a likely customer.

The company has said very little about the design and capabilities. This article, written without its assistance, builds on an earlier one that looked at the design, and another that considered likely electromagnetic missions, such as surveillance.

Much of this discussion is relevant to other prospective loyal wingman types, including the Kratos XQ-58A Valkyrie. The observations are preliminary, however, and will eventually be overtaken by confirmation of the ATS design.

Before looking closely at what kinetic missions may be possible, we must remember that ethical questions about the use of autonomous weapons have not been resolved.

Moreover, attack capabilities are easy to imagine but usually difficult and expensive to create. To make them possible, engineers must ensure that weapons can be carried, fed with satisfactory guidance data and successfully released.

They also must be released without undue risk to people and objects that the operator doesn’t want to hit, regardless of whether highly autonomous attack is ethically accepted. That’s a key reason why we can expect the ATS to be developed for electromagnetic missions before it eventually appears with weapons.

How would it carry those weapons? Since it’s stealthy, it should hold them internally, and examination of photographs of prototypes soon reveals space for two weapon bays, in the lower corners of the fuselage ahead of the main landing gear.

This is a small aircraft, so the size of each bay should be minimal. The probable length is just over 1.8 metres, enough to accept the 93-kilogram Raytheon GBU-53/B StormBreaker precision-guided bomb, which is the obvious standard air-to-ground weapon for the ATS. Since the StormBreaker’s diameter is only 18 centimetres, space may be available for a total of four bombs (two per bay).

If not much low-level flying is required, the radius for a bombing mission may not be much less than half of the 3,700-kilometre range (presumably ferry range) that Boeing quotes for the ATS. It may indeed be 1,500 kilometres, an impressive distance. This conclusion is based on the low drag of the internal payload carriage and the use of a small engine that’s incapable of high thrust (and therefore high fuel consumption) in a combat zone.

Soft, immobile ground targets with light or no defences are the first objects an operator would think of attacking with such an aircraft. Against serious defences on the ground and in the air, an ATS would lack adequate survivability features, notably high acceleration, elaborate countermeasures and on-board human decision-making. But, being faster and stealthier than a drone like General Atomics’ MQ-9A Reaper, for example, it would be much less likely to be intercepted.

An ATS could attack much as any other fast jet would, releasing bombs while approaching the target and turning away as they flew onward. If the drone knew its position precisely enough at the point of bomb release, inertial guidance in the weapons might alone be good enough for hitting the target.

For use against ground vehicles, the ATS would need an electro-optical and infrared sensor in its nose to detect and classify them. Once launched in their general direction, a bomb could again detect and classify them, requiring no more support from the aircraft. But adding a laser designator in the ATS’s nose would give the aircraft greater control.

For the operating air force, such capabilities against relatively easy targets would release crewed fighters for more difficult missions. A force of loyal wingmen with these capabilities would also enable more targets to be attacked over a given period of time. This would debilitate the enemy faster and stress its air-surveillance and fighter capacity.

In more difficult attack missions, ATSs could supplement crewed fighters, with the assumption that some drones might not come back.

And, for unusually dangerous attacks against targets of great value, ATSs could be used unaccompanied by crewed aircraft. For example, imagine them simultaneously rushing a strongly defended target in greater numbers than protective surface-to-air systems could eliminate. Some ATSs would go down; the survivors would hurl their bombs.

The target might indeed be an air-defence battery. Since that could cost well over US$100 million and its destruction might tear open a gap in the enemy’s air-defence network, severe losses among attacking drones could be justifiable.

Then there’s the possibility of air-to-air work. Since the ATS has little thrust, and since autonomous systems are challenged by the complexities of fighter combat, this mission seems improbable—until we remember that not every air target is another fighter.

Importantly, Raytheon has been working on an air-to-air missile that should fit into ATS weapon bays, the Peregrine, which is 1.8 metres long.

If the Peregrine or a similar weapon is indeed fully developed, ATSs could use it against unescorted bombers, transports, surveillance aircraft (including maritime patrollers and drones), helicopters, cruise missiles and other loyal wingmen.

Sensors such as the radars on Boeing E-7 Wedgetails could be used to direct ATSs to an intercept, which they might automatically complete. The drones would probably have to be operating in a free-fire zone—that is, a chunk of airspace without friendly aircraft.

They would need their own costly radars for acquiring the target and supplying fire-control data to their missiles. But that would still leave them far cheaper than crewed fighters, and they could be deployed in much greater numbers.

The operating air force would thereby enlarge an enemy’s risk in entering airspace within the ATS’s radius. Either the enemy’s fighter force would be burdened with more escort work or vulnerable aircraft might just have to be kept out of the area.

It’s important to understand the potential air-to-air mission as part of a central theme in the concept of loyal wingmen: these aircraft would be cheap in large part because they would generally be fitted with barely more equipment than is needed for any particular mission.

Fighters are exquisite packages of weapons, sensors, communications gear and human operators, all integrated with each other and into an airframe–engine combination that offers extraordinary aero-propulsive performance.

Yet most of that may be unnecessary for many missions.

If the pilot is left out, modest flight performance accepted, and other features disaggregated, the result is vastly cheaper to develop, manufacturer and operate—but, we must remember, still only a supplement to a crewed fighter.

If Boeing’s Airpower Teaming System proves to be viable, the Royal Australian Air Force of the future is likely to have scores, maybe hundreds, of fast drones.

The concept of the ATS is to provide large numbers of semi-autonomous helpers, called loyal wingmen, that can move towards an enemy alongside crewed aircraft and also perform missions independently.

Boeing is developing the ATS as a product for the global market. It’s doing this in Australia because the RAAF is using the program to explore potential use of loyal wingmen. The engineering is hard, and prospective application presents major challenges, so even the US Air Force hasn’t yet committed to fielding aircraft like the ATS.

But Boeing is notably building ATS prototypes with volume-manufacturing equipment and said last year that series production could begin in the middle of the decade. Flight testing is underway. If Australia goes for the loyal wingman concept, it is very likely to choose the ATS.

What the ATS might do depends on technical design details. Boeing has said little about this, but much can be observed and deduced. This article offers a preliminary technical assessment of the design; a second piece will discuss what that means in application.

Let’s begin with the major issue that we know least about: the degree of autonomy, which will surely start at some threshold level and improve over time. In the likely concept, people in other aircraft would tell ATSs what to do but, as far as possible, not how to do it.

The viability of the loyal-wingman concept depends fundamentally on providing an adequate level of autonomy. BAE Systems is deeply involved in this aspect of the project, working on the navigation, guidance and flight-control systems.

As for flight performance, the ATS’s cruise speed is easy to guess: it must be near the speed of sound for the drones to keep up with fighters flying to and from their mission stations. This makes the ATS much faster than drones designed for long missions, such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, which can stay aloft for 34 hours. The other side of the coin is that the endurance of the ATS might not be much more than four hours.

Unlike a fighter, the ATS can’t accelerate to supersonic speed in level flight. We can see that from the combination of the wing’s sweep (only about 30° on the leading edge) and its thickness relative to chord (about 7.6% on a mock-up displayed in 2019). Also, thrust is nowhere near enough for level supersonic fight.

The ATS’s aerodynamics might allow it to go supersonic in an operationally useful dive, however, and Boeing has further provided for such speed by shaping the fuselage sides to form diverterless supersonic inlets for the engine. Such inlets are also stealth features, supplementing such standard stealth shaping as the chines that run down the sides of the forward fuselage.

The degree of stealth depends on many details that can’t be assessed by just looking at the aircraft, but we can at least say that ATSs should be undetectable enough to operate alongside F-35 Lightnings without revealing the presence of the force package.

The ATS’s structural design looks conventional, with carbon-fibre-reinforced plastic over an aluminium substructure. Each ATS is likely to have a short flying life, so Boeing should be able to make many parts lighter than usual. The empty weight of the aircraft is likely to be less than 3 tonnes. (An F-35A weighs 13.3 tonnes empty.)

Every effort will have been made to cut manufacturing costs, a factor at least as important as anything else discussed in this article. ATSs are intended to be attritable, meaning they will be cheap enough to be exposed to high risk and often lost. An air force such as Australia’s could indeed buy hundreds of them.

The ATS is 11.6 metres long, which reveals the dispersal mode: it will fit in a standard 40-foot (12.2-metre) shipping container. The wing is a single piece with a span of 7.3 metres, clearly designed to lift off and lay in the same container.

The landing gear is of the normal, light and compact type usable only on hard, smooth surfaces. So the ATS will be able to fly from runways or roads; rough fields will be unavailable to it.

Boeing has said that the powerplant is a VLJ engine, meaning it was developed for very light personal jets. Only two Western engines strictly meet that definition: the Pratt & Whitney Canada PW600 (generating thrust of 7.2 kilonewtons, or 1,600 pounds, in its most powerful off-the-shelf version) and the Williams FJ33 (6.7 kilonewtons). In military service, engines could be pushed harder at the cost of shorter times between overhauls, a possibly unimportant sacrifice for attritable drones.

Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest such an engine would indeed be enough for an ATS to cruise at subsonic speeds to keep up with a crewed aircraft that it was working with.

The thrust levels discussed here will dismay people who admire the ATS’s shape, see something that looks a lot like a fighter and imagine fighter-like performance. But such performance is absolutely not affordable in attritable aircraft.

In one respect the ATS will fly like a fighter, briefly. Boeing has put the engine intakes in the usual fighter positions on the sides of the fuselage, where they can gulp in air even when, because of a hard turn, it’s coming from below. If designers didn’t want the ATS to turn hard, they would have fed air to the engine from above the fuselage, a stealthier choice. So, the ATS will be able to turn hard.

Why? Most obviously, to dodge missiles. But hard-turning aircraft lose energy—they slow down, lose height or both—and an ATS will not have abundant engine power to quickly replenish that energy. After one or two dodging turns, an ATS may find that its game is up.

An ability to slip into supersonic speed in a shallow dive would be helpful when working close to enemy fighters. The higher speed will make the enemy cover more ground before taking a shot, which may indeed be unachievable.

Unlike the engine of a high-powered fighter, the ATS’s little turbofan will be working hard even in cruise, a good condition for fuel efficiency. A small engine also leaves more space and mass available for fuel. So does omitting the human pilot and the associated seat, cockpit and other paraphernalia needed to keep a person alive in the stratosphere. The airframe is slippery too, lacking the draggy external pylons and stores of fighters.

All this helps explain the eye-catching range of 3,700 kilometres that Boeing quotes. We can assume that that’s the ferry range—flying from one airfield to another.

The ATS is certain to be designed for prolonged storage, like a missile, and that’s how most aircraft of the type will spend most of their lives. At any time, an operator will keep a few flying so pilots can practice working with them. For ease of storage, electric, not hydraulic, drive for mechanical systems is likely to have been preferred.

Its missions will depend on what operators put in the ATS. The forward bulkhead is in effect a hardpoint and the nose is in effect a store. The nose is an aircraft’s most electromagnetically valuable real estate, with the best lines of sight. The ATS’s nose volume is 1.5 cubic metres and entirely available to payloads. Operators will be able to fit different noses to different ATSs or even switch noses between them.

There’s also space for two weapon bays in the lower corners of the fuselage, ahead of the main landing gear, probably sized for stores about 1.8 metres long. Weapons are not likely to appear in early service, however.

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