Drone Pilots: The Future Of Aerial Warfare -- NPR
To understand how important remotely piloted aircraft are to the U.S. military, consider this: The U.S. Air Force says this year it will train more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined.
And that's changing the nature of aerial warfare — and the pilots who wage it.
Steve, a lieutenant colonel, grew up wanting to be in the Air Force. And that meant one thing: wanting to be a pilot.
To him, flying is physical: the pull of gravity, the sounds inside the cockpit.
"You hear those things, you feel those things, and you react to them as you need to," he says.
Steve joined the Air Force in 1997 and started out flying F-15s. But he quickly started to see signs that his world was changing. When he was given a chance to fly drones, he took it.
Now, he is at Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico helping the Air Force build a different kind of pilot.
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My Comment: Another indication that the UAV program is becoming important .... the US Air Force is now raising the "secrecy bar" for their drone program.