[angry_octet]

Yeah, you're not producing 5000 a year.

But it's a bit irrelevant because we couldn't produce enough pilots either -- the training pyramid means you can only graduate so many new pilots each year, capped by the number of instructors at each level.

There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.

[2trill2spill]

> There is a similar problem with drone pilots -- it took Ukraine and Russia years to scale up and get to the current level of skill. However, training drone controllers is cheaper because the aircraft cost nothing.

Unlikely that pilots would work for drones in a fight with China over the pacific, the jamming and electronic warfare environment would make remote piloting nearly impossible, which is why CCA efforts are looking at onboard AI piloted aircraft. Even in Ukraine the EW environment is so harsh that FPV drones have resorted to using physical fiber optic cable connections so the drones cant be jammed out of the sky.

Any sort of drone that has the range, speed(shaheds only go ~180 km/h), and survivability to last in or near Chinese airspace is going to be expensive and complicated.

[angry_octet]

I'm using pilots in the loosest sense, it wouldn't be FPV. Regardless, there is a significant skill requirement.

The lesson from Ukraine and Iran is that 180km/h is fine if you have enough of them. If you have a Jetson Nano and comms link on each one they could be a real PITA to intercept.

[carefree-bob]

Toward the end of WW2, even though the US and UK were turning German cities into rubble, the manufacture of german planes was still so great that empty planes sat around in warehouses because they could not find pilots to fly them.

That is why autonomous drones are very promising, because for manned flight, you will run out of pilots long, long, long, before you run out of planes. I don't think it's ever happened, that a nation with a large air force ran out of planes before running out of pilots.

So complaining about manufacturing capacity of planes is a bit goofy. I'd worry about surge capacity of things that are not gated by human operators. And only in the context of a regional war of choice overseas, since we'd just nuke anyone who tried to invade us at home.

Once you understand these constraints, you can better interpret why US production is allocated the way it is.