plawolf
Lieutenant General
The drones are designed for ground surveillance and attack, not air combat.
Those drones only have a single camera turret, which is unlikely to be able to pan around as fast as a human pilot could swivel his neck, since the gears and gimbals of the turret would have been designed and optimised for precise minute adjustments to track targets smoothly when the camera is in max zoom.
You need to constantly check your positioning relative to others in your formation and potential obstacles during formation flight. Requiring near constant, fast cross checking between various reference points.
Close, precise formation flight is taxing even for top pilots sitting in the actual cockpits.
With a slow sensor turret, and potentially lag issues, current generation drones were simply not designed or suited for close formation flying. It has nothing to do with pilot skill.
You need specialist drones with dedicated sensors and computers/software to do formation flying with them, which no current generation operational drone has, although work is being done in such areas.
To criticise current drones for not being able to do close formation flying is like criticising a transport plane for not being able to fly like a fighter jet.
