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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."
I like the comforting feeling of knowing there's a pilot in the cockpit.
Computers don't get heart attacks or fall asleep at the stick.
No, it won't. The one thing about technology is it starts expensive, gets cheaper and cheaper then a new breakthrough comes in and makes things more expensive and the cycle starts again. Just look at hard drives, they started incredibly expensive for a small amount of storage, then they started getting higher capacity and cheaper and cheaper, then the cycle is starting again with SSDs where just a few years ago even 32 GB was -very- expensive.
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Baghdad is hands-down the most complicated airspace in the world, with multiple simultaneous UAVs at any given time, plus rotary-wing and fixed-wing assets flying constantly, some which are engaging in real-world operations, like dropping bombs. The deconfliction that needs to be done with assets that are collecting, assets that are targeting, assets picking up or dropping off troops, Iraqi commercial aircraft, VIP aircraft, ad nausem is just mind-boggling. The ATC there does this every day. Why is flying one UAV in the US that big a deal?
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
My dad flies gliders and glider tug aircraft. One of the problems he told me about is that military pilots like to fly along a rail line close to an airfield where the gliders fly. They don't care that they are cutting through the circuit for an airfield. UAVs would at least follow instructions when transiting through these areas.
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These unmanned planes are especially dangerous to people attending a wedding or a funeral.
Especially when the guests are firing into the air in celebration or salute.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Huh? Why would unmanned craft have slower climb/turn rates than manned craft? Presumably they would be greater, since there are no squishy bags of meat on board that get uncomfortable while pulling a G or ten.
Anyone know?
Probably an artificial constraint so that interactions with other aircraft are not made worse. What if the UAV does a sharp turn into the path of a different aircraft, faster than its TCAS can react? Also many UAVs are currently remotely piloted, which leads to slower reactions.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You: "No. I like the comforting feeling of knowing there's a pilot in the cockpit."
TFA: "Because unmanned aircraft have never routinely operated in the national airspace system, the level of public acceptance is unknown. One researcher observed that as unmanned aircraft expand into the non-defense sector, there will inevitably be public debate over the need for and motives behind such proliferation."
Looks like your attitude is one of the things they'll be studying, hmm?
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I'm up in the air about this one. The US military is probably one of the biggest consumers of unmanned air craft, and has been using them extensively for quiet some time in Afghanistan. For the most part, the highlights scream "success", but I dont really trust the news for two reasons. One, the media is untrustworthy. Two, the military does not benefit by releasing news of drone failures (opsec issue and all, for those crazy left wing anti military whack jobs make of it what you will).
I'd be more inclined to support this if the military released unclassified reports on all of its unmanned UAV activities. Yes, UAV is not nearly the same as "commercial airliner" but its a good step in the right direction. The military can probably provide mountains of information on the outcome of thousands upon thousands of flights and all sorts of variable problems they have encountered (from mechanical to signal). This will be another area where military tech and military experience directly and dramatically impacts commercial applications of new technology.
Unmanned flight is going to happen. Not if, but when. This will occur with commercial cargo transports first (FedEx, UPS, etc), where saving money on "human support systems" will go a long way to reduce costs, improve route times, increase the amount of flights to be made, etc.. It only makes sense.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
I'm a pilot (A320 rating) and a software developer for a major brazilian airline. Unmaned aircrafts are remote controlled. Airbus and Boeing NG airplanes can, in fact, fly with almost no human intervention. But they only do that with very very specific scenarios and cannot solve any situation that is not predicted. In fact, there is no auto-pilot in the market right now that can keep a plane flying with 26kts+ of wind, it cannot predict the wind movement because it just can't learn how the wind gusts are behaving. 26kts winds are nothing, any private pilot can land a cessna skylane with that situation. IRS systems fail, VOR/NDB usually fail, ILS also. It is NOTuncommon to a pilot land a plane "tech-blind". That's just a simple scenario, there are thousands of situations where learning stuff on the spot is required. There is no computer in the market right now that can predict a wind-shear, thing that barely experienced pilots can. Students try to make a car drive by itself and that thing usually is too slow, unreliable, and just do wrong things. It will take decades of AI development to make a computer actually fly an airplane. Yes, I'm a A320 pilot and software developer, if you are too skeptical I can send my code you can check on ANAC website (FAA-like in brazil).
The one thing about technology is it starts expensive, gets cheaper and cheaper then a new breakthrough comes in and makes things more expensive and the cycle starts again.
The one thing about certified aviation electronics is that they generally DON"T get cheaper and cheaper. It's a limited market and the costs involved in certification are high.
this won't spell the end of private aviation, but don't think you'll get a transponder for $100 any time soon...
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
They'll mix in approximately the same way as chocolate and peanut butter in a Reese's peanut butter cup.
*smash*
"Hey, you got people parts in my drone!"
"You got drone parts in my people!"
Mmmm!
Unmanned trains? Sure. Planes? Not so much.
That's not to say that flying planes can't be made vastly easier. NASA's "Highway in the Sky" program is encouraging the development of some pretty nifty stuff. Think about the computer display in the Nostromo from Alien. The view of the flight path the pilot simply keeps it within the optimal path, no problem for most situations. But it's those unusual situations you gotta have the real deal for.
GIS data collection such as aerial surveying like the "Bird's Eye View" on Bing or 7cm or smaller resolution for overhead views, high resolutions that satellites can't achieve. They also would have the ability to collect when their is cloud cover as drones can fly under the cloud cover. Throw the GPS coordinates on to an SD card with something like Ardupilot and have it fly the route taking images that can then be stitched together. GE as a huge defense contractor would primarily just want to sell them for spying on citizens. Why we need full size UAVs when radio control UAVs can accomplish anything you'd sanely want accomplish without a human at the controls is beyond me. I could see drones being used to fertilize crops but you'd be nuts to let large tanks of anhydrous ammonia fly around on their own.
I spent a brief part of my career writing code for avionics. A serious amount of testing goes into the code before the FAA will certify it to fly; you have to prove that you've executed every line of code, that every line of code does exactly what it is supposed to, and that there are no paths that are never executed. But even with all of the testing we did, we would occasionally get a value we completely didn't expect and crash the demo box. Lucky me, I was just writing code to encrypt ACARS... nothing that actually made the airplane fly (or not fly...).
My husband and I were at AirVenture checking out EFIS sytems for an experimental aircraft that we're building. We managed to crash one of them not once, but three times, just by pushing a few buttons in rapid sequence. Granted, they were experimental and didn't go through all of the testing, but every now and then you also hear about a certified system resetting in flight. In fact, a friend of ours recently had his certified EFIS go into a reboot loop while he was in flight due to a faulty database update; luckily he was flying VFR and had backup gauges, so he didn't need the EFIS. There are procedures in place to handle this, but there are also people present in the cockpit to follow them. This is why fly-by-wire scares me, and why it's still a Very Good Thing that commercial aircraft have co-pilots and manual flight systems as backups. There's just too much that can go wrong to be able to trust everything to fly itself -- sometimes you really need a human in the mix thinking "outside of the box" when the feathers start to fly. I think the Sioux City incident is a major example of that, despite how long ago it was.
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If you read the Wiki page on Sioux City flight 232 you'll see that the issue has occurred several times with the crew finding the same solution each time. However on only one occasion has a plane suffered the same catastrophic failure and landed successfully which was the 2003 DHL A320 that lost all hydrolics when it was struck by a misile shortly after taking off from Baghdad Airport.
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The problem with gliders is that they like to fly extremely close to each other in thermals. If you fitted any kind of collision avoidance system, it would be going off permanently.