Unmanned aircraft systems have altered the fundamentals of battlefield strategy. Enabling commanders to deploy assets into contested areas without risking lives adds new facets to how commanders think about and execute missions for battle and intelligence. The use of unmanned systems allows for greater flexibility and speed.
To bring reliability to these new capabilities, military personnel must focus on continuously improving flight operations, a broad discipline that includes mission planning and command decisions, software and hardware engineering, flight execution, maintenance, ISR, and other crucial functions.
The adoption of digital engineering across the US military enterprise is emerging as a crucial tool in elevating flight operations from a supporting function to a primary driver of safety, efficiency, predictability, and lethality.
By leveraging capabilities like digital twins, AI, data analytics, and predictive maintenance, program officers can identify risks earlier, shorten deployment timelines, and increase confidence in outcomes for unmanned units and the entire joint force.
Here are three ways that integrating digital engineering offers significant opportunities to streamline flight operations and enhance mission safety and efficiency.
Digital engineering enhances safety, enabling the successful development and deployment of unmanned systems. The impact starts well before craft take to the air by broadly helping engineers, program officers, and commanders identify challenges before they become mission critical.
Defining Design and Integration Issues Early
One of the principal tools of digital engineering is the use of digital twins, which are end-to-end virtual models of an unmanned system and its individual components. They differ from CAD simulations in that they are continuously refreshed with real data to produce updated performance projections when implemented at full maturity.
Pairing digital twins with data-driven analytics and machine learning enables engineers to “shift-left.” In other words, rather than discovering challenges toward the end of a project, the discovery is moved to the beginning of the process through virtual modeling.
Digital twins enable technical teams to collect data from thousands of hours of flight simulations over several days, without the risks of time in a wind tunnel or on a range with actual unmanned craft. This work provides insights into extreme situations, such as heavy turbulence, and enables engineers to introduce specific failure conditions to observe how the craft’s software systems respond to unanticipated problems. NASA has implemented this concept by introducing a digital twin simulator that models conditions in the National Airspace System amid increasing traffic from crewless aircraft.
Doing Condition-Based Predictive Maintenance
Traditional aircraft maintenance is typically based on either a reaction to something that’s gone wrong or a pre-set scheduled inspection. Digital engineering identifies potential problems and enables their resolutions before they become critical issues. For instance, digital twins can provide data on how an aircraft might respond after a specified period of exposure to salt-laden air or extreme turbulence. That data produces insights into when a particular part exposed to those extremes might be expected to fail.
One particular benefit of predictive maintenance is its ability to support a full aircraft fleet. If one craft shows a problem in a fleet, it may be recurring in other craft. Proactive maintenance is based on data-informed predictions.
According to an article from the Federal News Network, the US Navy is pioneering predictive maintenance applications using digital twins to enable proactive part replacement and other repairs without taking assets out of service. The Navy’s goal is to “help supply chains maximize asset readiness and overall resilience.”
Simulating the Extremes
Digital engineering extends from the factory to the battlefield, opening new ways of training operators on how to adjust to challenging flight environments. In this application, it’s not just about ensuring that the aircraft works; it’s about mission assurance that enables unmanned systems to operate in the most challenging environments.
Digital twins support testing scenarios that would be too risky to conduct with real assets, such as operating in urban canyons, among mountains, or during severe weather. Technical teams can explore those “edge cases” using insights from virtual model-based testing.
Legacy aerospace development largely follows the so-called “fly-fix-fly” cycle, in which technical teams make improvements based on problems identified during physical testing or in-theater operations.
“Born Digital” as a Time Saver
Digital engineering enables virtual validation, saving substantial time that would otherwise be spent on physical prototyping. This creates a category of equipment that is “born digital,” avoiding the wasted time and supplies required for physical mock-ups.
Notably, the Department of Defense does not view digital engineering as a replacement for legacy physical prototyping, but rather as a complement to it. Then-Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall estimated in a 2023 interview that the digital engineering approach could yield about 20% savings in cost and schedule. He stressed that the digital engineering approach produces “incremental” improvements. “But when you’re doing something that’s going to be radically different than prior programs, you’ve got to get into testing to validate . . . your design efforts.”
The DoD applied digital engineering in the production of the new B-21 stealth long-range strike bomber and credits the discipline with speeding the path to low-rate production in January 2024. DoD officials note that the B-21 benefited from insights from both physical testing and virtual modeling. “You always expect to have some sort of discovery, and it’s just that process of if you discover something, you compare it to what you’ve found in the model, and then you go update whatever you need to update, and then you keep pressing forward,” the head of testing at Edwards Air Force Base in California told National Defense Magazine.
Supporting a Simultaneous Lifecycle
Legacy engineering typically consists of a linear sequence of activities. Digital twins enable multiple activities to occur simultaneously, so teams can collaborate in near-real time.
The so-called parallel processing reduces the time typically lost during handoffs from one part of the process to the next. Since digital models are available to all contractors and program offers simultaneously, a change to the digital design model propagates through the entire system, enabling others to make appropriate adjustments.
In short, the digital twin provides a single authoritative source of truth. This results in the creation of a digital thread, offering an always-changing data stream, where engineers can immediately access PDFs, spreadsheets, and drawings that document the model.
This approach is standard across the industry, as the Government Accountability Office points out in a 2023 report: “Leading companies use iterative processes to design, validate, and deliver complex cyber-physical products with speed. Activities in these iterative cycles often overlap as the design undergoes continuous user engagement and testing.”
Building unmanned systems faster and less expensively is essential, but it only matters if the end product is reliable. Here, too, digital engineering brings advances to intelligence agencies, unmanned program offices, acquisition officers, and the defense industry. The use of digital twins drives predictability and reliability.
Scenario Modeling With Virtual Rehearsals
Digital twins are eminently valuable in production, but they also play a role in mission planning. Commanders can simulate various mission routes and scenarios, including potential hazards, such as enemy radar locations, to determine the plan with the highest probability of success. It’s possible to run thousands of simulations in a short period to spot risks and increase mission confidence.
In a 2021 study, researchers from the Naval Postgraduate School found that digital twins “may enhance the decision-making process for the mission planner,” particularly when faced with managing multiple missions at once. Digital twins “provide valuable insights into the benefits and trade-offs for each route.”
In mission planning, digital twins also support enhanced contingency planning for operators. Repeated simulations can reduce the “cognitive load” for the operators.
Continuous Feedback Loops
Critically, digital twins can grow through continuous improvement, adapting to real data capture from prior flights. Having the ability to feed “black box” data from deployed UAVs into the model turns guesswork into empirical insights. Those help engineers sharpen their prediction of system behavior, leading to greater mission success in future operations. This mechanism also reduces variability across configurations, increasing the likelihood of repeatable, reliable outcomes.
Unmanned systems will become increasingly central to military operations. The ability to achieve mission objectives without risking soldiers' lives is a significant value proposition for the warfighter.
Digital engineering is introducing new capabilities for managing crewless-systems missions, and Sumaria is ready to help.
Partnering with Sumaria provides a strategic advantage through cutting-edge unmanned systems engineering and digital solutions tailored to defense programs. Our expertise helps you reduce development time, lower costs, and improve system reliability, ensuring that your programs meet critical deadlines and security standards. We are dedicated to supporting your mission objectives with innovative technology, experienced personnel, and a focus on long-term sustainment and upgradability. Let us help you achieve operational superiority and strengthen national security through advanced engineering support. If you'd like to speak with one of our specialists, feel free to book a one-on-one call.