Comment by fragmede
14 hours ago
It's not the expense of the pilot but the fact that the human pilot is subject to human biological constraints. Ie they black out after 9 Gs or so. An autonomous platform you'd want to design to be able to routinely do outside that envelope in a way that a platform designed for a human occupant is not.
Its a nontrivial exercise to design a plane which can regularly do more Gs then that though.
There's no drones currently in development AFAIK with this goal either - the focus is on getting them to do useful mission without a pilot, rather then out dogfight or outmanoeuver missiles.
Basically the point stands: a hypothetical "better then F-35" drone is likely more, not less expensive then an F-35.