Can Unmanned Aircraft Mix With Commercial Planes?

coondoggie writes "The Federal Aviation Administration this week signed a research and development agreement with GE Aviation to come up with a way to safely mix the burgeoning amounts of unmanned aircraft with commercial aviation. With this research the FAA and GE hope to accomplish an aviation first by completing the research to facilitate flight of an Unmanned Aircraft System with an FAA certified, trajectory-based flight management system. Integrating unmanned aircraft into the national airspace will be no easy task. The Government Accountability Office last year laid out the difficulties stating that routine unmanned aircraft access to national airspace poses technological, regulatory, workload, and coordination challenges."

Comments

Re:Where's the issue?

[ColdWetDog]

I don't see the problem in this. As long as you give the aircraft a simple AI (planes practically fly themselves anyway), and a pre-set route, they should be fairly predictable. A simple in-the-air navigation system for collision avoidance and you're set.

But OTHER aircraft might not be so predictable. TFA mentions, for example, gliders. They don't file flight plans. They're too small to carry much in the way of radar or other collision avoidance devices. Both UAVs and gliders tend to fly at low altitudes. Traffic can get very complex, very fast.

Besides, there is no such thing as a "simple" collision avoidance system. They're hard to do (mentioned, oddly enough, in TFA).