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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."
Only now they're not quite so goddamn funny.
Dog is my co-pilot.
"Why are you so against this military hardware used against our enemies? It's not like the government will be flying these things over its own citizens."
Fast forward a few years....
You're not doing anything wrong, right? You should have nothing to hide.
Eventually, commercial planes will be unpiloted - pilots are expensive. I'm guessing this will be a good test of that eventuality.
A few important points about this:
1. They are not talking about autonomous UAVs. These UAVs are essentially remote-controlled aircraft piloted by real pilots. I think some people assume these things think for themselves but that's not the case. Now that doesn't automatically discount concerns of safety, but "skynet" is not the case here.
2. This is not specifically for military only. Many uses for UAVs exist outside of military applications such as basic transport. Of course they'll use them for surveillance, but they already do that with aircraft. UAVs can simply linger longer because one pilot can take over during flight. Similar to how large aircraft do it now with redundant crew members.
UPS and FedEx and other air cargo type things I could see as a huge advantage.
Eventually refining the confidence and quality of the AI to the point where it could haul actual passengers. I'd bet that they mean time between failures of machines could out pace that of human error fairly quickly so it'd actually be safer.
Remember the Elevator had the same type of history. There was a time when an attendant was there to push the button for you as a way to reassure everyone that it was safe. Eventually people learned they could push the button on their own.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
This isn't the FAA building and deploying UAV's on any kind of scale. This is the FAA trying to figure out how to safely integrate UAV's into the national aerospace system (NAS). Personally, as a pilot, while I distrust the FAA to some extent, as the agency charged with ensuring safety of all operators in the NAS, they are the right agency to be performing this study.
When some other agency says they're going to start launching UAV's in the NAS, the FAA needs to have ammunition to enforce safety measures to ensure that the UAV's not pose an undue hazard to other aircraft and that the UAV operators respond accordingly to instructions from air traffic control.
Merde, il pleut encore!
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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. :)
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.
In most cases, though, with a modern fly-by-wire system the pilot has significantly better situational awareness, response time, and contro
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them