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Unmanned Aircraft Will Test Air Traffic Control
coondoggie writes "While the skies aren't exactly buzzing with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) just yet, experts are warning their explosive growth will require military and public officials to address the issue sooner than they might think.
The four chiefs of service aviation and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) branches told the Army Aviation Association of America's unmanned aircraft symposium last week that the military should crystallize combat air control regarding UAVs, while domestic authorities must work out access and use of UAVs in domestic airspace. "I'm surprised we haven't had a collision yet," said Rear Adm. Joseph Aucoin, director of the Navy's aviation plans and requirements branch."
It's easy for the next shift to take over the UAV terminal.
It's not so easy for the next shift to take over the f16 cockpit.
Also, UAVs are more expendable than ugly bags of mostly water, and ugly bags of mostly water tend to burst when they pull 25g turns...
1. For recon work you can pack more sensor equipment in, you can configure the UAV to have extremely long loiter times, some can be made a lot smaller and cheeper than a manned craft.
2. For combat craft the really big selling point is that when your fighter gets shot down you haven't lost several million pounds worth of trained crew in addition to several million pounds of aircraft... unmanned uav's can also pull alot higher G force than a traditional craft (ok the airframe can take it but the crew won't appreciate it).
--- Users are like bacteria -> Each one causing a thousand tiny crises until the host finally gives up and dies.
WOW. Talk about OFF-TOPIC. But let's cover what is perhaps the most salient point of your ramble:
People don't want to consider the possibility that their well-meaning thoughts are a joke and that a $200 truckload of rice would be of more use than Wi-Fi in the middle of nowhere.
Eh, that's a negative. If you want to see what foreign subsidies for basic items like food can do for (to) a local economy, one need look no further than Haiti.
Remember that the basis of economy is in commodities like food, clothing, and the like. These are the foundations of economy; everybody needs these items. And conveniently enough, they require very little economic infrastructure to develop. You plant seeds in wet soil to grow food. You spin fibers and cure hides to make clothing. Neither requires anything beyond 10th century technology to develop.
But subsidies short-circuit this basic economy. Your $200 truck full of rice (delivered for free) is cheaper than locally developed food. So, the very basics of the economy are devastated. Even such basic acts as growing a goat and feeding it garbage becomes not worth doing. The end result!? Nobody grows food, the population becomes less capable, they never develop the wealth necessary wealth to move into more advanced economy, and the area is now permanently depressed.
Take your $200 truck full of rice and cram it up your backside.
The OLPC provides the following REAL BENEFITS to the local economies:
1) It doesn't devastate the basic economy by its presence. Local folks can still grow food, dig ditches, and make basic clothing free of charge.
2) Due to its connection to the Internet, it becomes a replacement for an unlimited number of text books and reference material. Wikipedia, anyone?
3) Today's economy is not based on mass-based wealth, it's based on information flow. OLPC allows for the lowest-cost participation into this incredible world economy.
4) It provides the "disparity of wealth" scenario necessary for the impoverished to see that things can be better. Bill Clinton once commented on this: People who grow up in an "only-poor" neighborhood stay poor. The kids never see that there even is a world that's better, or at least, never see that they could ever have a part in it. Since they aren't exposed to it, well-off neighborhoods might as well be on the moon.
Children who are raised in a mixed neighborhood, with both poor and wealthy see the economic disparity, and are exposed to the culture of wealth. They have opportunity to better consider their position, and will realistically evaluate the costs of becoming wealthier. They are far, far more likely to decide that they don't want to be poor as adults and exert the appropriate effort necessary to make this happen.
By exposing the 3rd world to the Internet, where the wealthy are more accessible, more of the poor will not only decide on a better life, they'll have the means to do it, too.
Only history will tell if this project will really, ultimately succeed. But it's already succeeded at one thing: It's brought the cost of access to the most powerful information processing system ever devised to the lowest point it's ever been. The ripples of this will affect mankind for generations.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Those aircraft are very low weight composite aircraft with very thight energy budgets. Due to the composite parts, they are invisible to primary radar. Due to the energy budget, they cannot install an SSR transponder. In other words, they are completely invisble in case something goes wrong. (in which you cannot trust the transponder anyhow)
What you need in such case is a direct link to air traffic control to tell that your autonomious plane is lost so that they can clear a part of the airspace. Now, since your aircraft is no longer controlled by a "ground pilot", who is going to make the call?
One alternative is to let the ground station relay the aircraft position to ATC centers (air traffic control centers). However, current ATC systems are not built to accept this information, especially not when the number of users of UAVs increases.
You do realize that, to fly an airplane, it's not even a requirement to have a radio?
General aviation is a strange economic fluke - it's a cesspool like backwater of technology, seemingly frozen at its hey day in 1950 or so. The most popular plane flown today is largely identical to its 1956 ancestor - the only real difference is in the instruments on the panel, and even then, most planes are sold with classic "steam guage" instrumentation. Changes to the airframe and body are mostly cosmetic.
It's an industry largely paralyzed by lawyers. Recently, the parents of a 1000-jump skydiver sued the aircraft manufacturer when the pilot flew the plane into icy clouds and crashed the plane because the wing de-icing equipment was overwhelmed. It's like suing Chrysler because the driver of the car drove it into a brick wall at 90 MPH, and the seat belts just weren't quite enough. Except in this case, Cessna will probably have to settle.
Private airplanes == Rich guys == $target.
As a result, nobody wants to develop any new technology because the technology, even if demonstrably safer, will still be sued if it should ever fail. (which it would, eventually)
If some kind of law was passed at the federal level so that aviation was held to sane liability standards, so that plane manufacturers actually had the free resources to develop better technology, then aviation would be more modern, cheaper, and safer for all.
Really, why is it OK for planes to fly without even having a radio? It's almost 2008, we should have planes with full, digital situational monitors that tell the pilot about any looming threats. If you spend $500,000, you can have that today, but it should be costing somewhere around a couple grand. Since the entry point for aviation is around $20,000 for a basic, 2-seat plane, this is a big deal.
If planes reliably had a situational-awareness monitor, UAVs would be a non-issue. We have the technology - your $300 Garmin has more than enough processing power for this and already has all the latitude/longitude/altitude information it needs to make this work.
So, why not?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Dunno if this video is real, but it sure looks like it is. Near miss between a UAV and an Airbus A300.
For cargo planes at least, you can make a lot of savings if you don't have to support human survival on board. For example you don't need to pressurise the cabin (thus saving weight of air), nor provide toilets, sound insulation, heating systems, safety equipment etc.. With a redesign of plane you don't even need to provide standing room - you could fit cargo into a wing shape that didn't have the tube bit in the middle, thus making it more aerodynamic. You wouldn't be limited by how long people can tolerate being on board, so for cargo you could fly a plane say from England to New Zealand non-stop at a much slower speed, thus saving on fuel consumed, thus saving on weight of fuel you need to supply when you take off and so forth. It also becomes more economical to have smaller point-to-point cargo deliveries which don't incur the energy and handling costs of bringing a plane to land at a major hub, sorting the cargo onto an onward flight and shoving it back up in the air again.
43 - For those who require slightly more than the answer to life, the universe and everything.
Let me get this straight:
I have to take off my shoes and leave my toothpaste at the gate when I fly but hundreds of hick sheriffs and other random yokels are going to be piloting sophisticated UAFs in the near future.
Is that correct?