FAA Adds a Study On Adding Drones To Commercial Aviation

coondoggie writes "Facing a number of technical challenges, the Federal Aviation Administration said today it added another research project designed to better understand how unmanned aircraft can be brought safely into the national airspace. The FAA set a two-year research and development agreement with Insitu (an independent subsidiary of Boeing) and the New Jersey Air National Guard that will help FAA scientists to study and better understand unmanned aircraft design, construction, and features. Researchers will also look at the differences in how an air traffic controller would manage an unmanned aircraft vs. a manned aircraft."

Comments

Lots of useful applications here

[DesScorp]

Skynet jokes aside, drones are both useful and inevitable. And not only the winged ones. Look for a possible resurgence of blimps and airships in widespread use. Hang a radar on a blimp, park it at high altitude, and you have an instant radar system upgrade for air traffic control. Or for border patrol. Or for search and rescue. Etc etc etc. The uses for UAV's in the civilian sector are endless.

out-of-date complaints are out-of-date

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.faa.gov/about/office_org/headquarters_offices/ato/publications/oep/version1/reference/eram/

"The third and by far most complex step (ERAM Release 1) is the replacement of the Host Computer System with new software and hardware ... national deployment begins in FY 2009 and concludes in FY 2011"

and a lack of qualified workers to direct existing traffic, I don't think Skynet is happening anytime soon.

Can't really argue with that complaint, but isn't a lack of qualified people more likely to lead to the development of Skynet?

Re:Drones in US airspace?

[sznupi]

You almost do that already, with large part of most airline flights happening sort of autonomously; and newer airplanes with ability to do basically whole journey without direct control input from human pilots.

UASes really aren't like other aircraft...

[Chibi Merrow]

Let me preface my comments by saying I'm actually on one of the teams working on this problem at the FAA Tech Center, and that I was actually there during the signing ceremony yesterday (though I was mostly just annoyed by the loud music coming from the lobby interrupting my work and turned down the opportunity to take a bus ride to go see the ScanEagle fly). While we're excited they're loaning us two ScanEagles, we're already pretty deep into studying this problem. My group is on our third (or is it fourth?) simulation study right now, and we're ramping up for a gigantic one that will study a mix of GA, Commercial and about four to six UAS systems in a mixed-use airspace around the January timeframe. So now that we've gotten that out of the way, I'd like to address some of your comments. :)

Theoretically, nothing stops ATC from controlling these aircraft like any other, as long as there is a human pilot somewhere who can be told what to do. Use the aircraft itself as a radio relay between ground-based pilot and ATC.

Actually there are significant differences between controlling a UAS and a normal aircraft for an ATC. First and foremost is that it's a pilot's responsibility to see after the safety of his or her plane at all times, even if that means disobeying a directive from ATC. UAS pilots just aren't capable of this. They literally can't look out the window and see if they're going to run into someone or something. They also may be controlling more than one system at a time, which is something you never have to worry about in a "normal" ATC scenario. On top of this it seems that UAS operators may or may not be instrumented rated, which means they're not always trained for flying in controlled civilian airspace.

Oh and then there's the fact there are still many areas in US Airspace that have no radar coverage whatsoever. Yes, I'm serious. ATC depends on pilot reports in those areas. In the future we'll be practically eliminating radar for en-route ATC environments in favor of a satellite based solution like ADS-B.

And the final difference which the article actually touches on is that what we're simulating is a future airspace: one where we've moved on to trajectory-based operations. Currently an aircraft in controlled airspace moves along airways (or jetways), which are like one-lane highways that go from one point to another. This is why some people always see a lot of flights over their house, there's one or more airways crossing over it. Air traffic control's main responsibility is to make sure no aircraft comes within a certain distance of any other aircraft along these airways (usually five miles in an en-route environment, though that can vary based on conditions and aircraft types). At the traffic levels we're expecting in 10-25 years, this system breaks down.

In the future, aircraft will fly more direct routes to their destination (instead of navigating a graph of nodes via one-way connections), and ATC will be modeling their trajectories in four dimensions to make sure those safety bubbles are magically maintained. We haven't even finished figuring out how this will work for manned aircraft, much less when you add UAS to the mix (though a UAS will probably keep to their plotted flight plan better than a manned aircraft, but I digress). That many UASes and manned aircraft sharing airspace and traveling in all different directions is a scary thought right now, but that's why we're being so serious about simulating these things and developing very strict procedures for how it will be run.

Modern fly-by-wire is essentially a remote control system anyway. All we are talking about is a wireless control link, along with video and flight data -- a full scale flight simulator (without the simulator).

In most cases, though, with a modern fly-by-wire system the pilot has significantly better situational awareness, response time, and contro

Re:Cue Skynet jokes

[GooberToo]

For what its worth, Congress just passed funding as well as raised aviation taxes to fund the next generation of FAA/airport improvements.