That would be awesome. I beat Ace Combat 6 on the hardest difficultly level. Flying UAV's should be prety quick to pick up.
I hate to break it to you, because I love aviation and think it's a great field of work, but your game experience is not relevant.
I've flown the Ace Combat games and many other flight simulator games. In fact, flight simulators are the only video games I think are worth my time. But I also have personally have years of real-life professional flight simulator, aircraft and UAV experience. I can tell you with absolute certainty that there is not a single real airplane that flies as easily as Ace Combat. It's much, much harder in real life. So AC6 is not of any value in predicting whether you can fly a UAV.
Some relevant factors.
- Most UAVs do boring reconn missions. Any real flying is pretty unexciting.
- There are no air combat UAVs that shoot guns or missiles at other aircraft. They just don't exist yet. Forget whatever you see in the movies.
- There ARE some combat UAVs, but at present those are only firing at stuff on the ground. Those drones spend nearly all their time in boring orbits or straight flight.
- There are no dogfighting UAVs yet. Even the Navy's X-47B, which demonstrated a carrier landing and aerial refueling, is still just basically a straight-and-level airplane most of the time.
Consider that:
- Real-life aircraft can break. Games generally let you do whatever you want and keep you from crashing. UAVs are usually even less maneuverable than manned aircraft because there's no pilot on board to sense and react instinctively.
- Communication speed is a huge limiting factor for UAVs. The farther away the pilot is from the aircraft, the longer the radio loop, so the slower the response time. Slow response is a bad thing in an airplane. So generally speaking, the main use of direct pilot control is takeoffs and landings, because then the is UAV close enough to the control station that lag is not an issue.
- UAV autonomy is one way to overcome these limits. It's easily possible for a computer program to dogfight and keep the UAV within limits. But that very UAV autonomy prevents it from being a piloted UAV while in a combat situation.
- Many larger UAVs (big enough to carry weaponry) can be fully autonomous on takeoff and landing. There's little piloting taking place, just clicking with a mouse on a computer screen.
The real reason the military uses real pilots for flying UAVs is not because you fly a UAV like an airplane, but because you need to be completely trained in navigation and communication. Flying most drones is more of a radio and mouse drill than ever touching a control stick. You CAN learn a lot of those skills from better simulator games; some are not bad for learning how to use cockpit systems, but you cannot learn the reality and complexity of air traffic without getting a real pilot's license. Period.
Worth your time to watch:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/military/rise-of-the-drones.html
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around here. There isn't a local place that runs those is there?
