According to Lockheed Martin, AI has never before piloted a military aircraft.
A Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A training plane was recently piloted for more than 17 hours by an artificial intelligence agent. Software is typically used by VISTA (variable in-flight simulation test aircraft) to model the flight characteristics of other aircraft. However, during this test flight in December, it simulated a human pilot. Dr. M. Christopher Cotting, Director of Research at the US Air Force Evaluation Pilot School (USAF TPS), stated in a statement that “VISTA will enable us to parallelize the development and test of state-of-the-art artificial intelligence approaches with new uncrewed vehicle designs.”
According to Lockheed, this is the first time AI has been utilized in this manner on a combat aircraft.
