We have all heard in the news how UASs have been used by the military and police forces to catch bad guys. Sometimes referred to as drones, these strange looking aircraft seem to possess superhuman abilities to sniff out targets. So what are they really and what will happen when they start to appear outside the battlefield?
First of all we have to clarify the meaning of “unmanned”. Although there have been experiments with aircraft that were flying completely on their own able to even avoid other aircraft and obstacles, a UAS is typically flown by a pilot, albeit remotely from the ground. There are even hybrid types which do have a cockpit while they can also be operated remotely. Such vehicles are flown to the scene of the action by a pilot on board and then the mission is performed locally with remote control.
Clearly, the most critical element for a UAS is the air/ground digital link that connects the remote pilot to the controls of the aircraft and vice versa. A hiccup in this link in a combat environment, even if it leads to the crash of the UAS, is a big deal from a mission perspective but hardly something that is likely to increase the general mayhem already present. This is why so far UASs for military use have been developing relatively unhindered by regulatory intervention. In civilian usage however, the picture is very different.
Who would want to use a UAS for civilian purposes you may ask? Well, the obvious users would be police and customs surveillance and interdiction units, charting agencies, environmental protection, just to name a few. But cargo airlines of all sizes have also seen the potential of UASs to reduce costs. If you consider that for an airline, salaries are the second largest operating cost after fuel, it is easy to see why an aircraft with the flight crew halved or eliminated is such an attractive proposition.
While some civilian use could be envisaged in civilian but segregated airspace, the real impact will come when operations are conducted in non-segregated airspace.
Efforts to define the best way to integrate UASs into the civilian environment and create the appropriate regulatory framework are underway in both the US and Europe but the matter is still in its infancy.
In the civilian context, the connection between the remote pilot(s) and the air traffic control center responsible for the airspace in which the UAS operates adds a further layer of complication. Trials in which this connection was realized via satellites have shown clearly that transmission delays and occasional poor quality were a major hindrance and a risk factor to be eliminated. Of course satellite communications may be the preferred (or in fact only) solution for a military ground control station (GCS) but for civilian use Voice over IP type solutions would be a far better option.
There is little doubt that the main commercial push will act in the direction of making UASs more and more autonomous, that is to say able to perform more and more of its mission without being “flown” from the ground. Extremely reliable sense-and-avoid capabilities will be required before this becomes reality.
Another aspect of UAS operation that still needs a lot of work is ground movement. Considering how poorly piloted vehicles are equipped for moving around on an airport this is not surprising. With multi-million dollar aircraft basically still relying on nothing better than the pilot’s eyes to avoid collisions with other aircraft and obstacles and moving map displays only now catching up with what automobiles could do for a decade already, UASs have little to go on. This may of course represent a golden opportunity to develop some new technology that will benefit both UASs and conventional aircraft.
This is significant because legacy airport collision and runway incursion prevention systems typically generate a collision warning only in the tower and it is up to the controller to warn the pilot in turn. This is an anachronistic system even to-day and is totally useless with UASs mixed into the picture. The new visual tools for preventing runway incursions could work with the UASs sense-and-avoid capability and the new, direct in-cockpit warning systems should also be usable with a little adaptation.
So what are the prospects for UAVs in civil use?
This new technology has arrived at a time when there is enormous pressure on aircraft operators to reduce costs. At the same time, aircraft automation has reached a level where manual flying on transport aircraft is in retreat. I have little doubt that this commercial pressure and the economic benefits potentially available from UASs will push developments so that in a relatively short time there will be a positive safety case reflecting the increasing maturity of the technologies involved. At that point, overcoming passenger resistance will probably be the biggest hurdle still to be overcome.
Say ten years and the new cockpit will only have one seat for a pilot with a basket for a dog alongside. Why the dog? To bite the pilot if he touches anything….
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