When Royal Air Force Harrier jets attacked the mountain stronghold of Taleban and Al-Qaeda fighters in Afghanistan last month they were aided by one of the military’s newest pieces of technology — an unmanned aerial vehicle, or UAV.

The mission was part of Operation Mountain Fury, a continuing project to flush out Taleban and Al-Qaeda from their mountain caves in eastern Afghanistan.

American B1 bombers flew in at night to pound the mountain caves and, when the Taleban fled, the British Harriers struck.

A UAV flew silently overhead monitoring the mountainside with its infra-red sensors. These images were relayed to the Harrier pilots, who used the information to target the fleeing Taleban soldiers.

The squadron commander told a recent gathering of aerospace executives and RAF officers, including Air Chief Marshal Sir Glenn Torpy, that the UAV had been a vital part of the mission’s success.

Both the United States Air Force and the RAF believe that UAVs have a vital role in the future of air combat. They can operate for longer than manned aircraft and can be deployed in areas where the risk to pilots is too high.

Commercial uses for UAVs are also beginning to be explored, with oil companies expressing an interest in deploying them to monitor pipelines. Governments are considering how they could be used for border security and search-and-rescue missions.

Ultimately, the aim is to remove pilots from the sky completely and have both fighter jets and commercial airliners flown by computers.

While this may seem far-fetched, the Ministry of Defence believes that the jet fighters of the future will all be unmanned.

It does not envisage buying any more manned fighters after the Joint Strike Fighter, or F35, reaches the end of its lifespan in about 30 years.

More automation in the civil aerospace sector also seems inevitable. Passengers may be alarmed at the prospect of boarding a Boeing or Airbus that has no cockpit, but UAV experts point out that most commercial jets are already heavily automated.

They fly on auto-pilot for most of the journey and even have auto-land and land-in-fog systems.

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