Unpiloted Passenger Jet Tests

spacepingu writes "The UK military recently tested a remote-controlled passenger jet over south-west England. Although the pilot was sitting in the back of the aging BAC 1-11, he controlled it entirely using the 'UAV Command and Control Interface (UAVCCI)'. This also allowed him to operate several virtual UAVs in a simulated attack scenario. The ultimate goal is for a fighter pilot to control a swarm of attack UAVs alongside his own plane. Next March, a Tornado fighter pilot will use the UAVCCI to fly the unpiloted BAC1-11 as well as several simulated UAVs, all from the cockpit of his own jet."

Comments

What would Spock think?

[boxlight]

Machine over man, Spock?
It was impressive.
It might even be practical.
Practical, Captain?
Perhaps ...
but not desirable.
Computers make excellent and efficient servants,
but I have no wish to serve under them.
Captain ...
the starship also runs on loyalty ...
to one man,
and nothing can replace it or him.

Re:The real benefit of fly-by-radio

[Speare]

Does anyone have a link to that study where people were asked to press a button to "electrocute" other people, and how many were willing to do it as long as they were told by an authority figure it was ok? Were there also results regarding whether or not the subject could see the person being "electrocuted?"

No, but that's one of the best episodes of the original Twilight Zone... guy going around door-to-door, with a mysterious box and a dilemma: will you, miss, push the button, with the understanding that someone you don't know will die? She struggles through the idea until she gives in to her curiosity. Nothing appears to happen. Then he packs it up, and assures her that he's off to see someone else, someone who doesn't know her.

Re:The real benefit of fly-by-radio

[slashjames]

It's actually easier to crash/hijack a plane that's flown through radio controls than one flown by a pilot. If it's radio controlled, you just have to build a bigger transmitter and aim it at the plane (from a safe distance). At least with a pilot flying it they have to force their way into the cockpit. After September 11, no passengers on the plane will allow the latter to happen.

R/C? Cool. R/C with guns? Cooler.

[Kadin2048]

but somehow I didn't expect they'd put guns on them. Silly me.

Obviously you hang out with a different kind of R/C geeks than I do.

I've seen a lot of planes that are built with an extra servo for use as a bomb release (also good for clicking the shutter of a camera). And I know some guys that tried to put CO2-powered BB cannons on R/C aircraft, but they ended up just being too hard to use and too heavy to be practical. The gas systems required limit them to rather large aircraft and helis, the vibration causes them to jam a lot, and the obvious safety issues keep you from flying them in most places. Plus unless you have full-auto guns (they do exist) you can't do a whole lot with them, even in ground attack or against targets.

However, they're pretty cool when mounted on balsa-wood ships...

Not to be facetious or anything

[3.5 stripes]

But how do you control multiple vehicles moving at supersonic speeds in 3 dimensional space? I realize that most fighter pilots have things like g-forces to deal with, but even without that, there's a lot to think about in terms of movement, relation of your plane to target/other planes/other incidental objects..

Just seems like some serious overload to me.

Re:The Bravery of Being Out of Range

[b0s0z0ku]

We should put these drone navigation/steering controls into planes with pilots. Let the pilots steer for 15 minutes an hour, to keep them engaged. Let them analyze the air traffic data, with visual confirmations, for their airspace, shared with each other and on the ground. Keep all the telemetry streamed to the global network in realtime, instead of trapped in mysterious black boxes on the endangered planes. Put their bodies on the line, and their minds to work on keeping everyone safe.

Larger planes are already very automated, except for takeoff and landing (and some takeoffs/landings can also be almost completely automated). Believe it or not, most commercial flights are already 95% done on autopilot.

-b.

Re:Ultimate R/C

[TubeSteak]

If you can fight a war where no people* die, then fighting war just became politically cheaper.

*People as in the "there are only 3000 deaths in Iraq" form of the word.

From Starship Troopers: There are a dozen different ways of delivering destruction in impersonal wholesale, via ships or missiles of one sort or another, catastrophes so widespread, so unselective that the war is over because that nation or planet has ceased to exist. What we do is entirely different. We make war as personal as a punch in the nose. We can be selective, applying precisely the required amount of pressure at the specified point at a designated time. We've never been told to go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area, but if they tell us to, we can. We will.

Because of the Iraq war, the Army has suddenly discovered the effectiveness of Special Forces units, because those units make war as personal as a punch in the nose.

Show me a remote controlled machine that can "go down and kill or capture all left-handed redheads in a particular area" and I'll be impressed. Until then, you need infantry & Special Forces.

Re:I don't like this...

[b0s0z0ku]

No way in hell I'll get on one of these unless there is a pilot there to take control if something goes wrong. As a business traveler with over a million miles in the sky, I like knowing that there are humans in the front hearing and feeling everything that is going on.

Computers can sometimes route around trouble. But only trouble that they're designed for and that can be forseen by their human designers.

Case in point, United Flight 232. In 1989, over Iowa, a United DC-10's rear engine failed catastrophically, sending debris into all of the hydraulic systems. Such a failure wasn't ever forseen by the aircraft's designers, nor was it considered survivable. Yet the pilots brought the plane down to a controlled crash and I think half of the passengers survived due to the flight engineer steering the plane with the throttles alone (actually, the pilots dictated to the engineer what they needed done by moving their [inoperative] control yokes). An amazing case of human cooperation saving quite a few lives.

-b.

Re:The real benefit of fly-by-radio

[DerekLyons]

It's actually easier to crash/hijack a plane that's flown through radio controls than one flown by a pilot. If it's radio controlled, you just have to build a bigger transmitter and aim it at the plane (from a safe distance).

No, building a bigger transmitter won't do it. (I.E. as usual, the people who do things for a living have, unsurprisingly, actually thought about these issues - they actually do know more than the average Slashdot poster.)
 
It's easy to put an encoding scheme in place that has to be broken as well. It's easy to put 'bounds checking' code in place to prevent the A/C from doing something stupid. (I.E. commanding it dive uncontrolled or do something to render it unstable like turning too sharply.) It's eay to program the plane to enter a 'safe mode' when jammed or confused... etc... etc...
 
On top of this - all of these methods, and more, are well known and proven in actual use. (On both UAV's and satellites.)