It carries drones

I would rather have tactical and strategic airlift aircraft, as I noted in my recent post about Spain’s tactical airlift acquisitions, traditional cargo aircraft that can airdrop palettes can largely replicate this capability. The difference being that traditional cargo aircraft are incredibly useful for all kinds of things whereas a large drone carrier like this is only useful for launching killer drones unless it is modified into a normal cargo aircraft. I suppose this kind of design makes sense for a military trying to threaten with a credible capacity to invade Taiwan, but in the rush to make new cutting edge unmanned aircraft the basic logic and wisdom of taking human crews out of the equation backfires and vastly limits the usefulness of larger cargo type of aircraft in my opinion.

Smaller unmanned cargo aircraft definitely do make sense, but at this size? Why not just make the cargo aircraft capable of autonomous flight and retain the philosophy of investing in large airframes to be as flexible as possible?

From a fundamental design level, given how a lot of machine learning works, I would think the best possible heavy lift cargo platform would be a pre-existing manned aircraft where large amounts of human created and human curated flight data could be fed into autonomous flight models and refined in test aircraft as human pilots could naturally interface with the autonomous capacity and adjust as needed.

Think about it, at a certain point the design of flight models for autonomous aircraft are going to benefit from inputted flight data from human pilots. Yes… you could do that in flight simulators but real physical data is always going to be better so then… how do you get the human pilot to fly the aircraft live? Sure you can do an uplink and whatever, but we are talking about a moving platform here… doesn’t it just make more sense to retain the capacity for pilots, engineers and technicians to actually get in the aircraft, manually operate it/adjust systems and test/troubleshoot from within the aircraft? For a smaller more nimble aircraft of course not, but for a large cargo aircraft? The weight a human adds becomes minimal and a cargo aircraft with a full load isn’t going to be doing high-g maneuvers that a human wouldn’t be able to withstand… so I struggle to see the downsides so long as the integration is done intelligently.

TL;DR I would rather have a C-295