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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 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.
Some how I think the technological aspects will be the least burdensome to implement...
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Heck with the way things are now, the Auto Pilot can nearly land a plane by itself.
The idea isn't too far off, but to an extent, we already have an "Auto flying" system currently in use.
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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.
Do aircraft have fully autonomous co-computers that can recognize an unexpected fault and take full control of the plane? That's why commercial aircraft have co-pilots. A secondary system running the same code with the same flaws as the first doesn't cut it in this context.
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).
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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