An AI flew a US Air Force training aircraft for over 17 hours

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It's Tuesday, February 14, 2023.

An artificial intelligence agent recently flew a Lockheed Martin VISTA X-62A training aircraft for over 17 hours. VISTA (which stands for Variable In-flight Simulation Test Aircraft) normally uses software to simulate the performance characteristics of other aircraft. On this flight during a testing period in December, however, it mimicked a human pilot. US Air Force Test Pilot School (USAF TPS) Director of Research Dr. M. Christopher Cotting said in a statement, "VISTA will allow us to parallelize the development and test of cutting-edge artificial intelligence techniques with new uncrewed vehicle designs."

This is the first time AI has been engaged in such a way on a tactical aircraft, Lockheed says. It’s like they’ve never seen the 2005 box-office bomb, Stealth…

– Mat Smith

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