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Civil UAVs Still A Distant Prospect
holy_calamity writes "The aerospace industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies that would allow the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace, New Scientist reports. It will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum. What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one. Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?" From the article: "On the brighter side, last week the UN's International Civil Aviation Organization, based in Montreal, Canada, said its navigation experts would meet in early 2007 to consider regulations for UAVs in civil airspace. That could be a step towards internationally agreed rules for how UAVs should operate. Even if the UN body makes rapid progress, however, it will be meaningless unless the industry can obtain the necessary frequencies to control the planes and feed images and other sensor data back to base."
Civil UAV's are illegal? Then what the fuck have I been flying around the local park for the past year, a mechanical bird?
"It is possible to commit no errors and still lose. That is not a weakness. That is life." -Peak Performance
Note to article submitters and editors: In the first use of an initialism or acronym it is good practice to write out in long form the title or phrase preceding the initialism or acronym, so the reader will know what you are talking about throughout an article without having to stop reading and go look it up.
Otherwise you're mimmicking the drone who hides their lack of a real job or knowledge behind obfuscation.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
- Fighting fires, especially at night (current FAA regs prevent piloted aircraft from flying into fires at night)
- Mobile perimeter surveillance
However, having worked in the UAV industry for the past five years, it's pretty apparent that the current solutions are still pricey. I remember seeing an article about the LAPD launching a UAV initiative for surveillance.The technology is advancing and prices are dropping, but it's not time yet. Watch companies like Aerovironment and the normal defense contractors (Northrop Grumman, Lockheed, General Atomics, etc.) for future developments.
(Full disclosure: I don't work for any of these companies, and I don't plan on investing in them.)
I really don't like the idea of unmanned surveillance vehicles flying over urban areas, and hope they continue to not appear.
Hmmm. Maybe that burkha idea has some merit... or I could be all old-school and always wear mah hoodie.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
This appears to be specific to the USA, other places in the world appear to have it sorted.
http://www.aerosonde.com/ "August, 21 1998 the Aerosonde Laima was the first unmanned aircraft to cross the north atlantic. The crossing was completed within 15 minutes of schedule after a flight of 3270 km in a time of 26 h 45 min."
While Aerosonde do work with Military and government agencies world wide (including the National Hurricane Centre, Miami, Florida, they are still a civilian organization who had to negotiate with the Australian CAA (Australian version of the FAA) and FAA's for flight authorisation in civil airspace and it was managed through NOTAMS etc. I visited them a few years ago, and they said the CAA were very welcoming to aligning the flight rules for UAV's.
The spectrum is already allocated for TCAS (Traffic Collsion Avoidance Systems), all the aviation radio communications & satellite comms for control etc, so what additional part of the spectrum makes UAV's difficult?
I can see why the military would want Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicles (UCAVs) and UAVs. Long loiter time in hostile territory, high g tolerance, ready at a moment's notice, eyes always clear, reflexes always sharp. And if one crashes or gets shot down, no one you care about gets killed.
But for civilian uses, only a few of those really apply. Quick readiness is good, but how often do you need something like this outside an 8 - 5 day? Hig g loading is rarely an issue. Hardly anyone ever shoots at civilian aircraft. the long loiter time and camera observation ability are nice to have, but the privacy people will eat you for lunch if you use them the wrong way.
I can see how law enforcement might like this kind of thing, to stop smuggling and illegal entry. Or maybe to snoop on Mr Pot Head's next crop up in the hills. But they can borrow some planes from the military if need be. The average Joe Farmer can just buy some satelite imagery from his Co-Op or direct from the satelite photo company if he has the bucks. No need to have a plane ready to go 12 hours on station, watching for corn blight.
Nope, overall, I think civilian UAVs are just a non-starter. And by the way, think of the liability if one hits a passenger plane.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
Don't these guys count? Or are their UAV's too small?
http://www.micropilot.com/index.htm
-b.
But big brother obviously has the funds and is already doing border patrol between the USA and Mexico.
The thing is, current technologies look for only really two things: motion or IR (body heat). If you were wearing enough tin foil you wouldn't have a heat signature. I recommend spray painting it black first. Then hop the fence and proceed into Texas.
Well thats precisely what TCAS (Traffic alert and Collision Avoidance System) is designed to do, albiet in todays form its a warning system only and doesnt take action on its own but the current rules about it are that TCAS warnings and action guidance take precedence over air traffic control when the two conflict.
All you would have to do is implement this in the UCAV but have it *always* follow the TCAS automatically when it issues an advisory, no need to produce a new system when one already is in existence around the globe.
The aerospace industry has failed to obtain the radio frequencies that would allow the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in civil airspace, New Scientist reports. It will be 2011 before it can even begin to lobby for space on the radio spectrum.
I'm not a EE or RF guy, but would the ISM band be of any use in this case? It is unregulated, after all.
What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one. Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?
First, I'm sure that anti-collision systems are under development for military applications. Airspace over a battlefield is arguably far busier than most civilian airspace (except maybe some of the busiest airports). Of course, in military air space you must make sure that nothing is below when you intentionally drop explosive devices, which is generally not a problem in civil airspace. I can guarantee that every military that uses UAVs is interested in them not taking out any other aircraft through a mid-air collision.
Second, everybody (the private sector and the military alike) has gotten spoiled by the trends of the last 20 to 30 years to everything COTS. UAVs are arguably much more applicable in a military environment at this time. That doesn't mean that civilian applications don't or won't exist, just that for this the military is the main driver for innovations in this area. People old enough to remember the early days of the cold war will remember that the military was the single largest driver of technological and scientific innovation across the board.
In short, give it time. Nobody has been cheated, things are just progressing a bit differently from what us young'uns are used to.
One more GD thing to screw up general aviation.
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The US is one of the last countries that still has General Aviation. The airlines have been trying to gut it for years, post 9/11 regulations have done all they can to limit what pilots can do, and now we have UAVs. The only way to make UAVs "safe" from collisions will likely be to force everyone to fly under positive ATC control. If you have never flown low and slow in a Cub, do it now while you still can.
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I test UAVs for a living, and while this article may be true, there's much more to the story. UAVs, as they are currently designed, are 50-100 time more unsafe than military vehicles, and thousands of times more unsafe than commercial airliners (these numbers taken from Office of the Secretary of Defense report and white papers on the subject). The avionic computers they use are cheaper and less redundant than commercial aircraft by a large margin, and would not come close to meeting FAA standards. In addition, they require a large amount more of flight critical control software, all of which needs to be FAA certified also, and that takes a lot of time, test, and money. Bottom line is that don't hold your breath for civil UAV's, and go home and sleep soundly knowing you don't have to worry about unmanned air vehicles landing on your house overnight.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?
Wait, Slashdot is arguing for government probes that fly over our heads omnipresently? What is this, April Fool's Day?
TCAS will only work with a few rather big assumptions.
One, all aircraft have an electrical system.
Two, all aircraft have a (properly working) altitude reporting transponder.
Neither one of these assumptions is even close to valid. "See and avoid" is the only way to provide reliable collision avoidance, and no UAV currently has the capability to do that. Looking at it from a pilot's perspective, these things are too dumb to avoid me, and they're too small for me to see them. Not a good situation.
From the summary:
> Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil
> UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?"
Firstly, what "industry" would you be referring to? The issue is that the Federal Government/FCC will not grant the radio spectrum for the UAVs, not that some "industry" will not permit it. Secondly, this has nothing to do with the existence of military UAVs - there would still be spectrum (and aviation safety) issues whether or not the military has UAVs. Thirdly, it's not at all clear that we are missing out on ANY important benefits that cannot be attained under current law.
Brett
I work in UAVs (grad student, autonomous heli) and I can tell you there are a buttload of potential uses for civillian UAVs that are actually quite acheivable with affordable systems - especially mAVs and rotorcraft. Here's a few: Powerline maintanance (ie. autonomously filming and assessing widespread infrastructure) Crop dusting/assessment (ie. releasing chemicals, using sensors to detect time to harvest or the prevalence of bugs) Mining rescue (ie. fly down mineshafts looking for trapped survivors) Mining safety (ie. fly over a rock face looking for undetonated explosives) Dam wall maintanance (ie. fly close to a dam wall looking for cracks and defects) Inspection of factory ceiling and tall equipment (ie. fly close to obstacles in closed spaces) All are present or near-future capabilities (although true autonomy is still a little ways off) - and thse only the ones I can remember off the top of my head. I guarantee you that UAVs have more civil uses than are obvious. The catch, though, is that because UAVs are an unproven technology, people don't yet recognise that they're available and don't readily see the obvious applications they have because they aren't used to thinking about the capability. Some commercial systems you can get now are the Yamaha Rmax (including a fully robotised version), Camcopter, plus more from outfits like UAVVision and Aerosonde. It's not the big contractors who are going to make revolution in UAVs - RPVs aren't a new idea and autopilots that can fly autonomously have been around for ages - it's the newer, smaller developers who can leverage niche applications with small vehicles that will make it big.
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Not the greatest link but, excerpted from http://iagblog.blogspot.com/2006/06/faa-vs-la-sher iff.html
"For RC aircraft flight, the A/C must stay lower than 400 feet AGL (FAA Advisory circular 91-57), and according to the Associationof Model Aricraft's safety code, must stay in the control of, and stay within the sight of,an operator at all times. Autonomous flight is forbidden."
It wouldn't surprise me if there wasn't a size limitation as well.
``Has the industry cheated us of the benefits of civil UAVs by focussing on the demands of the military?''
No, the industry was created pretty much ex niholo by its customers. Said customers were the military. Nobody else was thinking ahead far enough to anticipate this at this time. So blame whomever you like, but include yourself in there for not being any smarter than everyone else in the governments who didn't forsee it and start planning for it before we knew when it would be viable.
well - tell me?
Arash Partow's Philosophy: Be a person who knows what they don't know, and not a person who doesn't know.
I immagine that civilian uses would likely follow the same mantra with the added "Cost" factor that military uses don't care about.
The military cares a LOT about Cost:
- The cost of a defective piece of materiel to a solder's risk.
- The cost of a dead or wounded soldier to a battle.
- The cost of a lost battle to a war.
- The cost of a lost war to the country.
"For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost..."
So the military defines a stiff set of standards and pays a stiff premium for getting good stuff (when they have the time to have it made to their specs). And they pay another stiff premium for having it made in places where the whole process is guarded against enemy sabotage and/or the factory is in a place they can defend it during a war so it's available to make more.
And when they do $100,000 worth of testing to be sure the screwdriver isn't going to break and put it in a toolkit that they make ten of, for an airplane they make five of, they get "a $10,000 screwdriver" and a bunch of flack.
And when that much money is flowing and there are only a few companies that can bid, they get gamed a lot, and there's opportunity for corruption.
But I'll take the military's idea of "Cost", thank you very much. They've cost me a lot of taxes. But they've kept most of the havoc on the other side of a couple of oceans for a century and a half.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
What's more, no national aviation authority in the world will allow civil UAVs without a system for avoiding other aircraft. And no firm has even started development of one.
These two sentences contain a good deal of less-than-true content. First, I happen to have an acquaintance who works on civil UAVs, and has flown them, unmanned and autonomous, doing urban mapping in Mexico--with the permission of the government, of course. Second, there is a good deal of work being done on aircraft-avoidance systems for UAVs. I have another acquaintance who is working on just that at MIT--not a firm, certainly, but I'm sure if the team comes up with anything good it will be applied in industry.
Be a PATRIOT--because the only thing we have to fear is the lack thereof.
Maybe IBM hasn't been called out because they open their drivers, and AMD as well as NVIDIA do not? Just a WAG.
Well...I can think of a few cases.
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring. Dunno where you live, but here in California and in many other big Western states wildfires are a big deal, and can cause $bazillions in damage if they get out of control. In some states they pay college-age schlubs to sit in fire towers all summer and watch for smoke through binoculars, which might be kinda' inefficient compared to an ultralight UAV with good IR sensors meandering along a fixed route for a week at a time. Furthermore, when small fires get going in remote areas, it might be quite expensive to send a human pilot in a big airplane to check them out or monitor them. Small fires should be let burn, unless they'll turn into big fires, because small fires clear out dangerous underbrush. But practically speaking you can only let them burn if you are sure they're not dangerous, because people will kill you if you are wrong. So you need very good and probably continually updated information on these fires.
(2) Search and rescue. Granted, this is not a big economic necessity, but there are a fair amount of these operations and they are very expensive, because there is usually a very big premium on time -- you need to find your lost people as fast as possible, so they don't die. That means a big operation with many high-salary people flying expensive machines. Wouldn't it be better to be able to launch a fleet of UAVs to divide the search area into sectors and get the job done faster by operating in parallel? In principle you can reserve your high salaries for the few people who have to fly the fleet of UAVs and interpret the photos. Not to mention the fact that their expendability means you can fly them in all kinds of weather. This is especially important for marine emergencies. Boats rarely get in trouble in good flying weather.
(3) Wildlife and domestic herd management. Sometimes you want to be able to find and track wild and domesticated beasts in very large areas of land. It's very expensive to hire a human pilot and his expensive machine to do it. But if (say) a rancher could fly a little 16-foot UAV around his land looking for a lost group of cattle with a joystick from the comfort of his workroom, rather than saddling up in the -10 F wind and riding through miles of snowdrift, that might be a very helpful thing. Or if a ranger could do the same thing to find a pack of wolves that he's worried might be getting a little close to a public campground, he wouldn't have to be so cautious about shutting the campground down.
(4) Distributed resource management. This isn't unlike the case for animals, but applied to nonliving stuff. Say PG&E wants to inspect their high-voltage transmission lines after an earthquake, make sure nothing is cracked and ready to fall off. Very expensive to send someone to drive along a few thousand miles of line, or fly an airplane or helicopter along them. But what if they could send a little UAV along them? Faster, cheaper. They could even break the job up and send forty UAVs out to survey the lines in sections, get it done in no time. You can make similar arguments about railroads managing roadbeds, transportation authorities monitoring roads (especially in the mountains), water agencies monitoring canals, oil and gas companies monitoring pipelines (especially in the wilderness) or offshore drilling locations.
I don't think your idea that satellite photography can fill the need is reasonable. Satellites don't have the kind of resolution necessary to find a crack in a pipeline, or a transmission tower leaning funny with a snapped lower leg. Furthermore, satellites are slow -- unless you are lucky and want something photographed at the time the satellite happens to be over it, you've got to wait until the orbit brings it around again. Not to mention the fact that quite a number of places aren't right under the orbits of any satellite.
... would the ISM band be of any use in this case? It is unregulated, after all.
It's unsuitable precicely because it's unregulated. That means there's no (legal) guarantee that the signal won't be jammed, leaving a potentially hazardous unpiloted device-in-flight uncontrolled.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
TCAS needs a transponder with alt reporting to work. Without that it is useless.
Not all aircraft have transponders or even electrical systems. They are not required outside of 30 miles from a major class B airport.
"See and Avoid" is the rule for this type of flight. Too see and avoid, you need eyes, or something at least as good.
They're autonomous so they don't actually need to communicate at all to fly.
It seems to me that a minimal amount of data would need to be exchanged to obtain necessary control over one. (go here, go there, do this, come back...)
You could do that with a SMS.
I would assume the majority of the bandwidth would be used to send back information... like video. Which may answer my own question...
Still for basic control... why would dedicated spectrum be needed?
The Yamaha RMAX (mentioned in the article) is a nifty helicopter. It uses a water cooled engine, has composite body shell, airframe, and rotor blades, and a nice onboard computer called YACS. Recently, a nearby company in collaboration with the local university installed a third party autopilot system that interface with the YACS and a ground station controller. The RMAX had first autonomous flight at a remote Air National Guard range and was successful. The 150 meter range restriction placed on the helicopter has very little to do with its performance; the RMAX can easily fly much farther and higher. Some useful applications for an RMAX in the US would be for highway traffic monitoring in busy cities ($150,000 UAV vs. several million dollar Bell 206), search and rescue, surveillance, and low cost aerial photography.
Aircraft can avoid each other, contrary to what the article states. Other users have mentioned TCAS, which warns a pilot when he is too close to another aircraft. The system interfaces with the aircraft's transponder and flight control system to decide what course correction should be made. For two aircraft approaching each other, opposite instructions will be given to the pilots so they fly away from each other. In a UAV, a system like this can be easily modified to simply command the flight control system to change course. In coordination with sense-and-avoid systems (RADAR), terrain avoidance, and other aircraft transponders, a safe automatic flight control system can be made for UAVs.
The technology for UAVs is young, and the equipment being used in many UAVs is not up to par because the only regulation is "you can't fly UAVs." Commercial airliners have triple redundancy for flight critical systems. If you think you have a rat's nest of cabling in your server rooms, you've never seen the wiring in a jet. Even a business jet has a enormous quantity of wires running through it. The reason for so much redundancy is very simple: if aircraft systems fail, people die. Death is generally bad. Since there is nobody onboard UAVs, the same redundancy is rarely installed. I have not worked with a single UAV that has any sort of redundancy for flight critical systems. Now, I'm not saying all UAVs are this way; the GlobalHawk is most certainly well equipped with redundant systems. Because the manufacturing cost of UAVs is so much lower than manned aircraft, many are considered expendable. The maintenance costs of manned aircraft are very large, and for some aircraft, those costs can eclipse the acquisition price very quickly.
There are many people involved in working with industry and the government to get UAVs flying in the US. Standard and regulations need to be formed, and I know several folks involved with that. Take a look at RTCA Special Committe 203 (SC203 Unmanned Aircraft Systems). Also look at groups like the Kansas UAV Consortium. They are comprised of industry, academia, government, and military partners dedicated to promoting UAV operations in Kansas and the US.
The UAVs flying today are rather impressive. In October I was an exhibitor at the Unmanned Aerial Systems/Future Systems Symposium. There were demonstrations of the Aerovironment Raven and AAI Shadow 200 UAVs. Both the Raven and Shadow demonstrated very good flying qualities. The Shadow even performed a flawless landing on a dirt runway.
Safety issues will be solved. If you're worried about the safety about civil UAVs when they get here, you aren't
That's true, but not every aircraft is equipped with the avionics necessary to make TCAS effective. I own a Falcon XP http://www.gecko-ak.org/N600LW/. It's basically a glorified two-seat ultralight registered as an amateur-built experimental aircraft, and it has no electrical system. Without an electrical system, I can't run a transponder, much less a Mode-C altitude encoder, and therefore a TCAS equipped airplane will have no idea that I am anywhere near.
Okay, so maybe I should get an electrical system, right? Problem is, there is a *really* limited supply of engines that have the proper size, weight and horsepower to work in my aircraft, and the one that is designed for my airplane (a Rotax 503--well, technically, the airplane was designed for the engine, but whatever) has a tiny generator that only has enough oomph to run the ignition. So, in short, there is no practical way of which I am aware to make my airplane visible to a UAV using TCAS. And I'm not alone--there are a number of small, light, certified airplanes like the J-3 Cub or Aircoupe that were originally certified with bona fide airplane engines that have no electrical systems. In the research I've done, the $1500+ transponder is *always* one of the cheapest parts of retrofitting these airplanes with transponders and altitude encoders.
So...unless the FAA is going to issue a notice to airmen or a temporary flight restriction (like we need more of those, but I digress), you can't guarantee separation between civil aircraft and civil UAVs in our existing airspace until either a whole buttload of existing airplanes are grounded or the UAVs are equipped with much more advanced avionics that can see and avoid airplanes like mine.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
All of these things can be done by pilots cheaper & better.
(1) Wilderness firefighting and monitoring.
It doesnt take a big plane to carry one pilot around looking for smoke.
(2) Search and rescue.
A good pilot can fly in any kind of weather too, and has a MUCH better chance of successfully picking people off a bobbing raft than any program you could possibly come up with... Cameras & code can only do so much... besides once you had the survivors aboard youd be breaking the law by carrying paying passengers without a properly certified pilot.
(3) Wildlife and domestic herd management.
Pilots do this every day.
(4) Distributed resource management.
Pilots also do this every day.
The most important asset a pilot has is his judgement. He has to be able to make a decision about whatever the situation is in an instant & has to make the right choice every time. Why are we trying to make computers do this? Because its cheaper? I doubt it, by the time you build the UAV and all the computer hardware necessary, trained the users, setup all the necessary infrastructure around it, you may as well have gotten an old cessna & stuck a pilot in it. You can get the plane for $20,000 or so & its not hard to find fresh pilots who will work for close to nothing just to build hours.
Would you trust your PC to drive your car? Would you trust it to drive your kids to school?
UAVs are neat in a sort of technological "look what we can do" kind of way, but they have no practical use that couldnt be better served by having a living breathing thinking pilot aboard.
http://www.flightglobal.com/Articles/2006/11/28/Na vigation/177/210809/USAF+starts+routine+flights+ov er+USA+of+Global+Hawk+UAV,+following+completion+of +Block+10.html
Whats wrong with using GSM, CDMA, or WiMAX. Whats the use for a dedicated frequency? Once can set up a wimax base station on a tower and use the unlicensed frequency, or use GSM or CDMA from a cellular network and send/receive data via the internet.
Check out my research paper on the OSI Reference Model
+1 to the original poster, for letting us know his real feelings by claiming people have somehow been cheated by an entire industry.
Whether it's civil or military, the "industry" goes where the needs are matched with money, plain and simple. The military has identified a CRITICAL need for UAV technology and has consequently poured a ton of money into deveopment. There is apparently no corresponding critical need for civil UAVs, and with nobody putting money into the research OF COURSE there is no movement in the industry in this area.
But I guess the original poster feels we are all cheated somehow, and that makes me question very seriously his motivations and concept of how the world works.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Is there any real chance that human-piloted airliners will spot you in less than ideal conditions? I don't really know anything about aviation, but it seems like seeing something as small and slow as an ultralight would be hard to avoid for someone flying something as big and fast as a big airliner.
Some time ago the folks in #mi2600 got to talking about the possibility of postal helicopters, for packages weighing a few pounds or less. I'm a big proponent; I think the prediction went like this:
Sure, when you're expecting a package, you print out helipad.pdf and tape it to the middle of your driveway.
A very high proportion of aircraft don't have transponders, so won't be seen by the TCAS in an UAV.
... and so on up to 1970s spamcans, some of which do admittedly have transponders fitted, but whether they work at all is one thing and whether the altitude encoder is also working is another.
Most gliders don't, most hot air balloons don't, most Permit aircraft don't, most microlights don't, most paragliders don't, and so on.
Then when you move on to "real" aircraft, most 1940s cloth-and-stick taildraggers don't
Plus, depending on where you are and what you're doing, you might not turn the thing on anyway (it's quite common to be asked not to in the circuit), and there are plenty of people who don't turn on mode C even though they've got it and it works. (Quite why they don't I've never understood, but it's a fact of life.)
No thanks, I don't want anything flying around up there that will fly into me quite happily because its TCAS hasn't seen me.
Not really. Airlines scoot up to 10,000+ feet as fast as they can (jet engines drink a *lot* of fuel at low altitudes). Plus, there's what's known as "Class C" airspace around most airports big enough for airliners to fly in an out of, and I have to call air traffic control to fly in Class C airspace since I don't have a transponder. What this means is I just avoid Class C airspace, since it isn't worth the hassle for me to fly there. By the time an airliner is out of this airspace, they are higher than I can fly, so the lack of a transponder is pretty much a non-issue. And, around the really busy airports like Sea-Tac, I'm prohibited from flying with 30 nautical miles, so I'm really not a factor there.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
Oh...and I forgot one other thing: my airplane has a *really* basic instrument panel, so I don't fly it in less than ideal conditions :) Even though I'm rated to fly in instrument-weather, my airplane isn't equipped for it, so if there's any question about the weather being good enough, I stay on the ground. If I'm flying my airplane in bad weather, airliners nearby are the least of my concerns.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?